Well, got heavily involved w/ a call from the west coast in the late afternoon…. A call that starts with “Well, I ran some scripts…” just never ends well.
Good news is that we got her 2,927 records back to where they should be. And a re-written script that if she ever uses it again won’t update the entire freaking table. And tomorrow, she’ll be getting instructions on how to use the interface IN the software so she hopefully will not have to mess with the scripts anymore. (But if she does, at least she has ones that will do less damage.)
Though I should have been off at 5, I was there til almost 8 on just this one call. Upside is that I wasn’t the only one there (have a couple people til 6, one til 7 and one til 8) and one of our other telecommuters on a different piece of software was going through his own hell with one of our consultants so we did lots of bitching back and forth on IM.
I think some of the senior folks have gotten a touch spoiled w/ me and my training-partner-in-crime (TPIC) around, LOL. We’ve been triaging calls like crazy so we were doing a large chunk of callbacks and they could cherry-pick from the notes. Worked well, they had less initial callbacks to do and got to pick what they were good at to deal with. Over time, the triaging has dwindled significantly.
One of the senior folks was giving us some (good-natured) grief last week that we were still triaging a few of them and not taking them all the way through. OK, point taken. So, no more triages.
Hmmm, so if we’re not triaging anymore, that’s less initial callbacks we can do and more that they have to pick up again. But it didn’t seem to be working out quite that way as yesterday I was doing callbacks and suddenly I find myself with six calls assigned to myself and new ones still coming in. Well, I’m off new calls at that point so I can clear some of mine out.
At this point, one of the managers comes out to me and says, “Um, do you realize you’ve gotten six calls assigned to yourself?”
“Yeah… I’m not going to take any new calls for a little while unless things get REALLY stacked up so I can get rid of these.”
“OK. Well, if you need any help, holler. Cause well, you’re new, and they’re not. And you have six calls and none of them do.” (Them being the senior folks.)
I think she was a little ticked that me & TPIC are madly taking as many calls as we can handle to keep the callbacks down as we have been, and still trying to see them through as well, and the senior folks aren’t stepping up to do the initial callbacks. We’re still getting the hang of “how long can you let a callback go before you look up and it has 10 more behind it”…
So, we’re getting there. It’s still hard as hell, and I still have some customers I’d like to toss of a cliff, but I really like it.
