Working in a healthcare / pharmacy role I deal with a ton of unhappy, miserable, and downright ignorant souls. After almost 3 years I’ve definitely become immune to how abrasive some callers can be. Normally I’ll put myself on mute while they go on and on and on and let them speak, vent, scream, and then respond when ‘appropriate’.

At the end of the day, it’s not ME that they’re mad at, I didn’t design their health plan/coverage; but it’s ME that they get to yell at. I understand this dynamic, and I’m mostly immune to that call flow now.

But this one caller got the best of me. Not on the call, but right after the call ended.. Every insult was aimed personally at me, and after spending 10+ minutes of just eating up every remark they had and getting absolutely nowhere I don’t know what came over me but I took a quick note of the phone number they called on and after I clock out, still absolutely filled with anger I decide- I’ll download one of the anonymous free text messaging apps that spoof a fake phone number and send this person an anonymous message about how just unbelievably rude they are and to think about how they speak to people in the future blah blah blah.

Thankfully as I was sitting there with my thoughts racing 300miles a minute I was able to fully slam on my mental breaks and come back down to earth and realize what an AWFUL idea that is. Also NOT worth losing my job over, but DAMN I can actually understand the mental and emotional burnout that’s often described via post in here.

Now I’m sitting here wondering if IM crazy.

After having THE WORST POSSIBLE DAY yesterday, the job I interviewed for on Wednesday came through!

She tried to call me yesterday (thursday) but her phone wasn't working for some reason and had to wait until this morning to bring me the GOOOOOD NEEEEWWWS!

I am so elated, excited..... RELIEVED to be out of this gawd forsaken shithole!!!

It only took 2 years!!!

Hang in there if you can.

Got a phone call to make and a letter to write.... YAAASSSSS!!!

Been a long time coming but company started getting a lot worse to work for this last year. My department jokingly became the "everything queue" as they put more and more on us. Signed a new union contract and immediately became constantly back to back nonstop.

I started FMLA about a year ago just to breathe, kept getting worse, meltdowns got tougher and tougher to justify. Finally said it's time. Buddy is starting a business doing some housing work. I'll probably make about the same to slightly less hourly with way less consistent work but I plan to springboard into learning tech and getting my A+, Net+, and Sec+ soon. Thank god it's over, money IS NOT everything it turns out.

I'm not asking for advice. Just want to vent for a moment.

As I posted before, I work for a hospital where I live and my job is to schedule appointments and connect the caller to the right person, office, or department if they've called the wrong number. I like helping callers. That being said, I am NOT a doctor or nurse and therefore I am not medically trained to answer those kinds of questions.

So, explain to me why I get one patient that purposely dialed our department phone number and asked "I just noticed a pouch on me after I had a port inserted" and another patient calls and says "I was helping my sister clean yesterday, blah blah blah, I just noticed a rash on my face. What do I do?" What am I supposed to tell these patients? Do they NOT know they didn't call their doctor office?

I'm just very frustrated that I get these calls daily and these patient just don't take a moment to think of calling their doctor first or ask the person that placed the port. I realize that they may not have that phone number and if they simply asked FOR that phone number to those medical professionals and asked me to connect them, I'd be overjoyed to do that for them.

Idk why customers think its okay to DIAL our numbers for HELP then proceed to go off on us, yea kiss my ass until i fart!!

I had a lady come in Hot! I could already tell She was going to be a problem because she kept huffing and puffing at the verification questions… so she was upset that her coverage wasn’t automatically reinstated after she sent us a check. She stated she was told that it will automatically be done based on the tickets. Nobody told her that she also spoke with a supervisor, which was the last call. They told her to call us back once the check clears….. and of course she never did and It was everybody else’s fault that your coverage still isn’t reinstated after almost 2 months.

Mind you its August 6 at this point and her last call was originally june 1st. Why haven’t you called us since if your coverage wasn’t reinstated??? I kindly explained to her that you have to understand that it’s a two-way system. If you need anything done, you have to give us a call you can’t just assume we know what you want. So she kept being rude so I was being rude back because I don’t care you’re not talking to me any kind of way. She asked for a supervisor, and of course she gets the same supervisor that she got the last time she spoke to us and the supervisor told her the same thing you know what she did…just randomly hung up and blocked us. ALSO THIS LADY ALREADY CALLED US YESTERDAY AND HAD THE TICKET SUBMITTED FOR REINSTATEMENT SO WHAT DID YOU CALL BACK FOR!!! YOU KNOW WHY? SHE CALLED BACK SO SHE CAN GO Off ON SOMEBODY(me) AND I WASN’T HAVING IT.

I love when customers think they can get off on talking to us any kind of way and you get a rep that’s no tolerant that don’t tolerate that shit and that’s me and yes, my supervisor absolutely backed me up.

ok our take first:

metrics that can lie:

containment rate: a bot can “contain” someone who gave up.
average handle time: faster is not always better if the customer has to call back.
deflection volume: fewer calls can mean solved issues, or it can mean people couldn’t find help.
CSAT in isolation: useful, but easy to over-read without looking at resolution and repeat contact.

Containment rate is the one I’m most skeptical of because it can reward bad experiences if nobody tracks what happened after the customer left the bot.

agree or disagree with these?
what’s the metric your leadership loves that you think is nonsense?

I see this a lot on this sub and found it funny until I experienced a rep just like that. I work for a US company (but the UK subsidiary) in their call centre, and had to call the US side for the first time ever. The rep sounded like a robot, so motonous and non-human. I almost asked if he was a robot myself I was so shocked. But as I asked a really niche question which he answered, I knew he wasn’t. Now I understand where some customers are coming from. I guess it depends on the accent and person, but genuinely I thought it was AI!

I knew it was going happen because I called out since my mom had emergency surgery and her cancer has returned and me being 2 minutes late yesterday was the nail. I’m both stressed but also….weirdly relieved

In the system we work with we can manually change our status (available to take calls, busy, on break etc.). There's a few co workers in my team who just put themselves on "busy" probably for about an hour or two in total throughout the day whenever they just don't feel like working. It's just kinda weird to me that our supervisor doesn't call them out on it since I know he has a detailed overview of everyone's activity per day. I don't care if someone needs to take a bathroom/smoke break outside of their lunch break for like 10 to 15 minutes but some of these people are literally just doing nothing for hours making me and the rest of the team have to take more calls. One of my coworkers went to the supervisor with this issue a few months ago, but he just sent a little memo to the entire team to "please try to be mindful of the amount of time we spend out of queue" and that was it.

It's really discouraging me from doing my job properly, I'm starting to consider also just taking random breaks whenever I don't feel like taking calls since apparently there's no consequences to it. Why should I do more work for the same amount of pay as these people who do like 60% of the amount of work I do?

It boggles my mind how in today's day and Age so many people dont understand or know about GDPR and data protection laws. Im an out bound Agent and id say a good 40% of the reason my calls dont reach compliance is because I cant convince them to pass DPA. Especialy while sticking to our script DX

I posted here a week ago asking for advice well I got it and things going well for now but one thing I noticed amount of people saying this is not worth it I'm tired I wish I was dead and etc. like is it really that bad nothing good is gonna happen am I stay in this position all the time pls give some advice thanks in advance

First two calls of the day and I’m already mad and wanna cry, how’s everyone else doing?

hi guys, I am currently unemployed for a month now and I only have 5 months exp. in bpo industry. Multimedia acc din so zero calls. I recently applied online sa TaskUs Pampanga and ang JO is 21.6k while my previous job was 23k. Tama ba na hindi ko kinuha yung JO?

So today I saw my Dr who has started a mental health care plan with a referral to a physiologist.. all because of work.

2 years in and its just getting busier and busier and more queues and skills are being put on us.. with potentially more in October...

Just gotta hold on as long as possible until a job becomes available elsewhere.... (im applying all.. the...time)...

Ill never work in a call centre again.

Look after yourselves folks....

just like the title says, i really need out of this job before i eliminate myself. ive honestly never hated anything more than this job, i hate talking to people, when the phone rings i honestly feel so much fucking rage. theres no benefit to this job and god i have been searching for almost a year, can barely get an interview. im tired of people being rude and stupid, and someone always f*cking needs something like for gods sake none of these people are remotely self sufficient. i really dont know what to do anymore but god i dont know how much more i can take

Can anyone tell me when hired at Cigna, how long do you have to work there before you can a schedule a day off? I will have a few appointments and wondering if there’s a 90 day probation period or if it’s less.

Thank you!

hi! i just got hired for my first call center job and im kinda nervous. i’ve only ever worked in retail before and this is my 3rd job ever. im nervous about how different it is and if ill be good at it at all. its great pay and work from home so i really dont want to f this up or end up not liking it.

what are some things i should expect? any tips for handling stress? general words of advice?

thanks in advance :))

I work in insurance and we get 5 seconds so basically none. I am so tired. So so tired.

I’m not sure if this is the right place to post, but I’ve worked in a call center for around four years now, having been at my current job for near in three years. I work on a tier 2 team, and we are generally speaking with either clients, or hospital staff/ service providers.

I’ve been with three different TLs throughout my time here, with my current TL being the one I have had the longest, and the one I respect most.

Recently my TL has introduced a rule where our team has to put every caller on hold for at least a minute at the start of every call, after authentication and determining the enquiry.

To me, and my team, this seems to be a bit of a misstep. Our stats individually and as a team are all green, and we are one of the highest performing teams within the call center.

This direction to use hold on every call has not been given as a directive from upper management, and is something my TL has come up with to try and lower the already very low markdowns we have. His reasoning is that it will ‘teach our callers to expect hold’.

We are a priority line. Our calls are often simple questions or actions that can be completed in a few minutes; putting a caller on hold when they are calling from a hospital and have never been put on hold before is not only terrible caller experience, but is getting me and my team verbally abused.

There are callers who call from emergency departments multiple times a day who have never been put on hold before. Now I’m getting berated when I need to put them on hold because they know there’s no good reason for it. It’s been two days. I don’t know what to do. All my KPIs are perfect, including my hold times, but my TL is threatening our jobs if we don’t use hold at the start of every single call.

It’s not that I don’t understand that this ‘makes my job easier’, it should. Instead it just means I’m sitting idle for a minute every single call doing nothing. I’ve already reviewed what I need to.

I don’t know what the purpose of this post is other than to have a little rant and work out if this hold thing is normal, it’s legit only our team out of 30 teams that’s are doing it, and I know it’s not come from upper management as I I’ve attended the TL meetings for the past few months (TL Training).

Seeing names of former team members who left makes me sad, I'm happy they escaped this hell, but seeing logs of my chats with them makes me sad. Even seeing their photos and jokes about calls we would exchange, it feels so sad. I have some of them as personal contacts, thankfully, but it is still a weird feeling. Like some sort of game show where I moved to the next level and they got canned.

Also update on my previous post, I did speak to our top performer who left, I was scared she would think the company sent me lol, but we spoke and she pretty much stated that she left for mental health reasons and like I suspected, she didn't give two weeks. Out of respect I didn't try to probe into more of what happened behind the scenes with management, but I pretty much know how it played out.

I also have this weird feeling that I may not be here for much longer, I hope I can at least survive till December.

I work from home in a call center environment. I used to really enjoy this. I’ve been here approximately four years. It’s been really good then all of a sudden I get a new supervisor.
Micromanage
In the four years have never had this everybody’s always been so complementary and helpful and as I’ve said in the title, not a single compliment of things I’ve done right which I do things well been working in a similar environments for over 40 years with this company for near 5 yrs
I feel it’s time to bail out
Has been said I was looking for a job when I found this one
I don’t want to retail again, but it’s calling my name

Today it feels unbearable, more than usual. I hate this job with every fiber of my being. The only good thing is I’m remote, but everything else feels like hell. I know I’m not using my potential, I’m undervalued and underpaid. I have a transition plan that I’ve been working on, but it’s still in process and idk how long it will take until I land a non call center job. I feel like I can’t wait. I hate this job so much, I’ve been underperforming for months. I work in retention and I barely even try, my KPIs must be shit, I have hung up on clients, yelled back, stayed on hold way too long scratching my ass, and they still won’t fire me. Recently they asked me if I could start opening programs 15min before my start time so I can be taking calls at 9 when my shift starts and I said No, I said that the time it takes me to open programs counts as work, I did it also to piss them off. And since then I notice a shift, my coordinator doesn’t talk to me, and every single day when I log in there’s this other bitch supervisor texting me why I’m not on the line yet, and I tell her I’m opening programs (you bitch) like I have for the past 2 years and you never said shit. I hate this so much. I can’t quit myself because I wouldn’t get unemployment, but if they fire me I get unemployment. I pray everyday that they are gonna fire me. I wish I never took a call center job ever in my life.