On Being Just That Good

[pantherchild.livejournal.com]

~My boss is a total showoff. In addition to being an ass. :-)

~(I should mention that everytime I speak about Christian being as ass or the devil, it's becuase I like him so much. He's honestly the best boss I've ever worked for. He hates management bs, and doesn't do it. He doesn't give us bs, and we don't give him bs. He treats us like REAL PEOPLE, beleive it or not! He still gives management the bs they desire...he's got a bs voice you can hear from a mile away.)

~Anyway, he's often said things like "I could take 60 calls a day." "Someday, I'll get on the phones and show you HOW IT'S DONE." "You guys are goddamn pansies."

~No one really beleived him--I mean, sure, we believed he was damn good...but 60 calls? The most I'd EVER seen anyone do was 32 and even that was a stretch. The most I'd done was 16 (admittadly, it was only my first week.) so I thought 60 was crazy!

~Yesterday, more than half the team was out for bullshit 'soft skills' training (PLEASE KILL ME NOW.) and half the guys who were suposed to be on the phones didn't drag themselves in until 9:15 or so (we open at 9am) and numbers dwindled througout the day until they were dropping calls left and right.

~So, Christian got on the phones.

~He did 14 calls in 1.5 hours, as well as making tickets for all of them, doing his normal job, and dropping in on us in our training (to point and laugh. He said he put us in it because he hates us....I believe him.)

~That's almost as many calls as I take in an 8+ hour day! It's half of what the top calltaker took that day!

~Damn, but I want to be that good when I grow up.

~So, that being said...how many people here are the top or close to the top ticket/call taker/maker at your job? And what makes you so cool?~

Comments

[inahandbasket]

back when I worked a real call center, our loose quota was 30 a day. I averaged about 50-60.
We got hit by some nasty viruses (2002-3), and those days I was in the 120-150 range.

This was internal support for mostly doctors and researchers, so I wasn't supporting Joe Q. Dumbass, made for slightly faster calls since you had to repeat yourself (only) slightly less.

[justsomegurl.livejournal.com]

my call volume varies depending on other projects I am assigned. sometimes I take the most if nothing else is going on. I think I've just found good ways to get the customer moving along. In the beginning it is hard to get the customer to give you useful information, but you learn the right questions to ask after time

[bard-mercutio.livejournal.com]

I'm top, despite being part-time. Some of it is experience as I can identify a problem faster than any of the other techs, while some of it is personality as in I don't chit-chat while my fellow techs will talk forever, but a lot of it is willingness to answer the bloody phone. Everyone goes into a panic when I'm gone; it's very amusing.

[zhent.livejournal.com]

I was top call taker, now I'm a team lead.

We don't really count calls, but when the queue was averaging 20 calls a day I used to take 40. Right before they promoted me, I had a little contest with another tech. We went through our day and tried to create as many tickets as possible. The queue goal (for the team I was on at the time) was 1.2 calls per hour. I did 5.2 per hour, for a week. The girl I was "competing with" did 4.1 an hour.

[d-l-leonine.livejournal.com]

I'm typically on top or right at the top of our department in calls per day, average talk time and productivity. In addition to that, I manage to get 3 comics per week drawn (most of that is done while waiting for our moron customers to follow my directions though). I don't think I'm cool for it, in fact, I don't care what these halfwits think of me. Just as long as I'm off the radar (and if I'm on top of the stats sheet, I'm as far off the radar as one could get)

[dysan27.livejournal.com]

hummm, just curious but what comic?

[d-l-leonine.livejournal.com]

http://leoninecomics.comicgenesis.com/

[spacebird.livejournal.com]

my secret:

[gilmoure.livejournal.com]

I, too follow Dogbert path. I'm fairly new to call center but am already one of the high number guys. Real secret is I don't wait for after work time to run out but instead punch in for the next call. Can take 2 or 3 calls in 5 minutes it takes others to take one. And I don't take 15 minute breaks, either. There's usually enough slack time (0 calls on board) to grab a drink. Not smoking also helps. And this is with an 80% closure rate on hardware support.

[snoopyh42.livejournal.com]

Back when I was a phone jockey, I had the lowest call time (below what was considered minimum) but nearly the highest call monitoring score on the floor. I don't know of anything special that I did, just focused on getting the problem solved as quickly and accurately as possible so I could get back to my book...

[xforge.livejournal.com]

I do about 15 when I'm the floor guy. If I'm on the phone all day I do at least 30-50, and I'm a piker compared to our main phone guy who I swear does 70 or so, or would if the phones would stay ringing that long.

Then again, a lot of our calls are password resets and stuff. I imagine it'd be far lower if we were helping people diagnose connection problems or things like that.

[redqueenmeg.livejournal.com]

It depends on what queue I am supporting. My top day I took 95 calls. Routinely when I was doing desktop calls, I'd get 50-65 calls done per day and the others around me would do about 30-40.

Naturally, they have all been promoted, and here I sit.

[notthebuddha.livejournal.com]

that's what you get for being indispensable.

[redqueenmeg.livejournal.com]

I'm completely not, though. Based on what they use me for, I am 100% replaceable in about .0000001 seconds. They could replace me in that amount of time with someone they would only have to pay about half what they're paying me.

This is actually not an enviable position--I'm running scared every day.

[harry-whodunnit.livejournal.com]

Did 120 one day at my first ISP tech support job. A regular day was 100 - 105. I think I was burned out before I finished my three week probation.

[annamaryse.livejournal.com]

i did 2nd tier phone and email support for a software company for 2 1/2 years... and I was #1... I knew every issue and was able to hone in on problems like a 6th sense...

i handled 45-55 calls a day while my coworkers did 25-30 calls a day... and they made mistakes all the time and pissed off the customers all the time.. (everyone loved me and I never made mistakes EVER) but.......

I got fired. So being the best, being really good with customers, and being on top of it ain't always enough. Some bosses WANT you to be less than all you can be. Whatever.

[bekscilla.livejournal.com]

Last week i was taking 45-55 calls a day, which is about normal for me when I'm available all the time. One other guy is similar but most of the team are a lot lower.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

I've been top for a while. I average about five calls an hour (180-200 per week), but that includes the slack times between calls. Apart from one other guy (who has the technical skills of a duck, you know), everyone else sits on about two to three calls an hour.

At a previous job, which was purely logging and assigning to techs who were constantly moving about the building, it was more like 25 an hour. The saving grace there was that we rotated through the positions, and there were 12 'walkers' and only two phone bunnies (supporting two thousand managers and execs), so the time on the phones only seemed longer.

As for technique, in the current position it's a number of little things that all add up. These include -

- keeping to the point on the phone

- having seven years of experience with the systems in question, including having written most of the support and training documentation at one point or another

- keeping logs to the bare necessities

- a typing speed honed by ten years of IRC

- having a text file full of chunks of text I regularly use in logs, so I can go copy-paste instead of spending five minutes hammering away on the keyboard

- likewise, personalised text templates for certain types of calls (the corporate templates are full of unnecessary crap and are often actually incorrect)

- realising that although some local people have written barely-functional piles of VB which can semi-automate some of the processes some of the time, that I can often do it faster manually, and can check for many more potential problems at the same time

- a truckload of verbal phrases, timings and tones I've built up over the years which I've tested, honed, changed, compared and retested until I can get almost any caller to do exactly what I want them to do with a minimum of wasted time

- being able to determine within seconds (instead of minutes) if someone is wasting my time with a call and knowing a whole bunch of ways to get them off my phone ASAP

- making up my own mind about whether to listen to management when they say things shall be done a certain way, and dismissing the inefficient stuff. They don't have the time or drive to come after me for it, as I can wield red tape better than most of them and know where their financial skeletons are buried

- rejecting years of unsubtle hints about applying for promotions. I've tried supervising, and I don't like it. I signed up to be a tech, not a paper-pushing, clock-watching, red-tape spewing corporate line-toer. As a result, I'm the longest-serving tech in our area. All our supes have less experience than me, so they stay out of my way

- sarcasm and the love of pointing out the huge logical and logistic flaws in most management decisions

[jdotmi.livejournal.com]

- a typing speed honed by ten years of IRC

Ditto.

- keeping to the point on the phone

- having seven years of experience with the systems in question, including having written most of the support and training documentation at one point or another

Pseudo-Ditto. I keep to the point up until there is something that has to wait while I fix it, then I chat with the customer to keep them from going "OMG WHAT'S WRONG". I just don't use a lot of "well" and "um" "the point is" and "it seems that" while on the phone. And I sure as hell don't talk about the computers in question as "those little rascals" like a former temp-co-worker of mine did.

And while I didn't write most of our documentation, I do have 3/4 of it memorized. Including stuff for systems I didn't support until a year ago when the three seperate help desks we had merged into one.

- keeping logs to the bare necessities

I can also type and talk at the same time. I'll be replying to an LJ post, typing in command line fixes, and writing my case notes and flipping back and forth between the three while talking to the caller about the weather because the fix I just started takes 45 seconds to actually work and that is a really long time to be quiet with a panicked caller on the phone. :-p This means my call logs are very detailed, and very to the point.

I use complete sentences and even include full file paths and exactly what was done to fix the problem so that any tech who has been trained here can understand it. Sadly, our "customers" (all "internal", but when you're a bookstore chain with over 1000 stores... the definition of "internal" stretches slightly) will some day in the not so distant future be able to read their case histories, so I can't say what I'm really thinking about in the calls. And it needs to be readable and at least minimally understandable to someone with a basic grasp of the English language.


Of course, now that I've been promoted, it's all moot. I was one of the top call-takers in the department when I was actually taking calls. Now I just take escalations, and that's an infinitely more annoying beast. Especially when I realize that some of my former co-worker techs aren't quite as good with the ticket entry as I am. Or with the fixing of easy things, such as the "shut up and reboot" fix.