My Name Is

Thanks to Jenny the Bloggess's tweet of Saturday, I too have had a mini rant about people getting my name wrong. It's on "hello my fucking name is", (click) but if you can't access that site because of all the expletives, I have recreated it here for your delectation. Bon appetit!

My name is Sarah. It has been for over thirty years thanks to my parents. Most people have their parents to thank for their name.

However, despite this, my mother often gets it wrong. I'm the youngest of three: my brother Simon is six years my senior and Samantha (Sam) is five years older. Simon gets called Simon by our mother. Good for him. Sam gets called Si- Sam. Mum's train of thought for remembering her children's names must go chronologically. Ergo, I get called Si-Sam-Sarah. Always have done. Love you too, Mum.

Through my life, I have encountered many people who ask if my name is with a H or without. It's with. WITH! If it weren't, I’d be Sara, pronounced Sarr-rarr. Stupid people. That's a completely different name.

However, things took a surreal turn six years ago. I got a job in a call centre. I have targets to hit, partly made up of quality checks. To hit my quality scores, I have to say certain things including introducing myself. (That's pretty much common courtesy anyway.) In my time in the job, I've been called the following, by customers and colleagues alike:

Sharon – Okay. It starts with the same letter. I can cope with a little brain fart.
Amanda – Weirdly, quite a few different people call me this. I must 'look' or 'sound' like an Amanda.

I can’t work out the train of thought in these:
Tracy
Charlotte
Rebecca
Ginny
Elizabeth

Don't they listen?! I'm Sarah! SARAH! It's an easy, common name! DON'T MAKE ME HURT YOU!

Nails Inc.

Last week, one seemingly fed-up Nails Inc. customer started a bit of a mini-avalanche on their Facebook page in regard to their freight charges. They offer a choice of freight options: free if you spend £50 or more (before freight); Royal Mail at £4.95; or DPD couriers at £5.95.

Nails Inc. customers are already paying £11 per bottle of varnish, which is a lot but the quality is there. However this customer complained that the freight is a lot in addition to the cost of the polishes, which I assume (note: I do not know for certain) do not cost anywhere near that to manufacture.

Various people, commented that they could ship a bottle or two via Royal Mail (including packaging) for a fraction of the freight charge Nails Inc. offer for the same service. I believe this. I use Royal Mail for mailing packages for friends’ birthdays and Christmas at various locations around the UK.

At least twice, Nails Inc. countered this increasing number of complaints with the following statement:

Many thanks to everyone for their comments regarding postage on www.nailsinc.com We are taking these very seriously and will feedback as soon as we can.

Yet still the complaints came. Yesterday, their response to this was:

Thank you again to everyone for the feedback on our postage and packaging. We would like to confirm that we have not increased the cost for delivery – the cost remains at £4.95. We have changed to ‘Royal Mail Tracked’ which is still an excellent recorded delivery service.

Which did not go down well. I decided to enter the fray as well, with a piece of my mind left on Facebook;

You might as well just charge us £5 and come clean that you're shafting your customers.
Why not take the lead from other online retailers such as Amazon who offer a variety of delivery options?
I didn't take advantage of the latest Lucky Dip because your delivery costs seem to be non-negotiable.
You said you would listen to your customers (your source of revenue) but less than a week later you're not doing a thing to help us help you maintain your sales.
I think your polishes are really fantastic but on Friday I went to Boots instead & treated myself to three just-as-lovely No.7 colours instead.

and this post.

Why this post? Because last week during the initial set of complaints, I noticed one user complaining about the poor customer service provided by Nails Inc. I too have been on the receiving end of this, and would like to share it with you. (I have removed the majority of pleasantries for the sake of brevity.)

From: Sarah
Sent: 14 January 2011 11:10
To: customerservice@nailsinc.com; support@nailsinc.com
Subject: Email Address Amendment
Importance: High
I have registered for email newsletters using my personal email address,
personal.email@genericISP.com, this morning, then created an account to place an
order but the system would not accept my personal email address again and I've had to use my work address, work.email@genericcompany.com . I then tried to amend the address in my profile to my personal address which was rejected again on the grounds of duplication.

Please can you arrange for my account profile to be amended so the address is personal.email@genericISP.com.

From: support@nailsinc.com
18/01/2011 15:59
Thank you very much for sending us these details through. I have passed this on to our web team to rectify for you.

From: Sarah
Sent: 11 February 2011 09:17
I am still unable to change my address. Please advise.

From: support@nailsinc.com
15/01/2011 10:28
We have passed you query through to the web team again to see what their progress is with updating your address.
I apologise if this is taking longer than we expected.

From: customerservice@nailsinc.com
23/03/2011 10:17
We apologise for the delay in getting back to you on this.
We were told that this email amendment had been made by our web team but as you say it obviously has not been changed. We have put this case through to them again to resolve and they will come back to us as soon as they can. In the meantime, if you would like to make a phone order with us for any of our products online please give me a call on 0203 405 1451.
Thank you for your patience on this matter and we hope to resolve this soon.

From: Me
01/04/2011 18:25
To whom it may concern.
Further to the below issue which is still not resolved (as originally requested on Friday 14th January 2011) I now have a further problem. This morning I received the latest newsletter and a discount code as my birthday is this month. I appreciate the
discount and already know what I will use it on.
However when I logged into the site this evening, my account no longer shows me as an Ultimate Reward Scheme member (which was purchased on 14th January, order reference [redacted]).
Nor do any of my previous orders* appear in the order history.
As a result my accumulated Ultimate Reward Scheme points are not available to me at
the checkout.
Please can you ensure that my account is rectified as soon as possible, and my missing points returned to me.
*The missing orders are: [redacted for brevity]
I look forward to hearing from you on Monday 4th April.

You may be able to tell from the final email I had lost my temper at this stage. Also there are no further emails as they did not reply on 4th April, I ended up calling them instead to find out what had happened.

This is where it gets silly.

Because my personal email address was already on their files from when I signed up for the newsletter, they transferred all my order history and Ultimate Reward Scheme details over, rather than simply changing the address on my account from my work one to my personal one.

Also, it took from 14th January until 1st April for Nails Inc. to rectify this. The only thing in their favour is their politeness in dealing with me. Yes, they responded to my repeated emails in a timely manner and courteously but I wonder would my problem had been fixed if I had not persisted in chasing it. I never got an email from them which was unprompted by me.

You're lying to me

Customers. I love them. On the whole the people I have to deal with are friendly, personable and understanding members of society. They understand that I am not a disembodied voice without feelings and I think the same of them.

Unfortunately it has often been my experience that you always remember the odd horrid caller because it sticks out in one's memory. These are the ones who make you grumble about your day come vodka O'clock.

I know it can't be all bad, I've been doing this job for over six years now. But it's conversations such as this which get me down.

Female caller "Hi, I'm calling to chase an order for trial products placed with you."
Me: "No problem. Do you know on what date they were ordered?"
FC: "Um... I have an order number here?"
Me: "Okay. The number is...?"

The caller reads out a number to me which is not a number I recognise. It should be 8 digits long, beginning with a 2. I explain this to her.

Me: "Do you know roughly when the order was placed? Perhaps in the last week? This month?"
FC: "This month, definitely."
Me: "Okay, let me just look up May's orders. The consumer's surname is...?"
FC: "Jones."*
Me: "I'm sorry, there aren't any orders this month for that name. Which product was ordered? Maybe I can locate the order that way."

She tells me the product, parameters and pack size.

Me: "Unfortunately there aren't any orders on your account for that consumer name or item. Would you like to place an order with me now?"

I hear a bit of a scuffle as the female caller passes the receiver onto her male colleague, whom I recognise as the owner of the store.

Owner: "Why is the order not on my account?! I have an order number here for it, I was offered free trials for the product as I was told the revenue boxes were out of stock!"
Me: "I apologise. Let me double check for you. Please can you tell me the parameters again?"

The owner tells me and I see that there are no trial or revenue packs which match the consumer name or parameters and I explain this to the customer. He repeats that he was offered trials because he was told the revenue packs were out of stock.

Often a caller will snap at us because they are trying to save face in front of their consumers. As politely as I could, I explained to this caller that the product in question is our most popular item which rarely goes out of stock in either revenue or trial packs. Unfortunately on this occasion it makes the owner flip. He then snaps at me and refuses to believe that we generally do not have out of stock issues with this product.

Tellingly, though, he says he will call back and slams the receiver down rather than placing an order with me. I have interpreted this as he cannot get away with a complete about-face with me regarding the way he has just lost his temper, but will be able to act as nice as pie with the next person he speaks with here and will place a seemingly regular order for the trial product.

I have a bit of a catch for him. It is not unusual for my colleagues and me to send a group email out to one another warning of a potentially irate caller on the warpath. I have done this because it's pretty much all I can do. It takes an extraordinarily nasty caller to have a team leader telephone them back and give them what for.

*It's not Jones.

Hateful Customer

I had a happy experience this week. Happy in the sense that, well, it wasn’t at all happy. As I have mentioned, I work in customer services, processing orders and dealing with myriad customer issues. I like doing my job, I take pride in it and I have said on more than one occasion that I wish to treat my customers as I would like to be treated myself (I have very high standards when it comes to being a customer). I have completed two award levels through the Institute of Customer Services (http://www.instituteofcustomerservice.com/) and coached two more people to success in the same award.

I answered a call on Tuesday from a customer who wished to speak with my employer’s sales director. Following procedure (set in place to filter cold callers etc) I directed his call to one of two other colleagues who take any requests to speak to the MD or a director, neither of whom were at their desk. Rather than dump my caller onto voicemail, I offered to take his telephone number and pass his request on so someone would call him back.

At this point he demanded to know where my organisation’s head office is (USA), their telephone number, my name and the names of the staff (the team leaders who oversee customer services) who have told me I have to try these two colleagues for calls such as his.

Unfortunately for him, due to protestors, my organisation has a no-names policy, which in my case I am not allowed to divulge my (or any colleagues’) surname. He informs me he will be telephoning my organisation’s head office to get one or both of the team leaders fired for not letting me put his call directly through to the Sales Director or the MD (whom he has now requested to speak with as well).

He then proceeds to tell me a long-winded story about how he was pressured into attending an interview with one of the armed forces way back when, how one of the interviewers (a brigadier, if I recall) said something which he took as an insult, and how to exact revenge for this slight, later called said officer a rank below that which he was. Can you say petty?

The point of my caller’s story was thus: if I can’t think for myself, and if I can’t think to ignore the instructions laid down for me then I should tell my superiors where they could stick their rules and resign.

Yes, this customer was telling me to leave my paid employment (of over five years), in this financial climate, with the daily horror stories coming out on the news about forthcoming private sector job losses, with no job to move onto, solely because he couldn’t speak to the person he wanted and because I wouldn’t (and couldn’t*) do anything about it except remain calm, listen to all he had to say without interruption and repeat my offer to have someone return his call as soon as.
I don’t think so.

If I hadn’t been so angry I’m positive I’d have been in tears. You may say, oh, what an adult reaction. Indeed, however in the time I’ve done this job, taking 150 calls a day (approximate average) I’ve cried once over awkward customers, once when I was new and a bag of nerves.

*I couldn’t because we don’t have an official receptionist so calls which would ordinarily be dealt with by that role (such as this one) are dealt with by my customer service colleagues and me. (I will iterate here that I am not a receptionist and I have a bloody good idea of what that role entails, it actually being my previous salaried role. In the call centre environment I am employed in, I have specific, measurable targets to meet.) Reception-style calls as efficiently as possible using the two staff members who filter such calls on our behalf.

Anger

I feel angry today. I don't think I have felt it all day but I certainly wasn't feeling on top of the world when I woke this morning. I've felt kind of near the end of my tether and liable to snap given the right provocation.

I had that provocation about two hours ago and my stubborn self won't let me admit that part of the problem is mine. I take criticism badly and that's what triggered it.

I was told recently that anger is our illogical, unthinking self reacting how it wants to external stimulus. Right now I can see the point of the person who told me that. Had I thought about how what I was being told was making me feel, maybe I could have controlled my reaction and potentially not hurt the feelings of the other person.

Is it progress when you can see how lessons you've been taught can be applied in reality? Is that what learning is? If so, when do I consider that I have learnt what I was taught? Now? When I apologise to the person I reacted like this to? Or when a similar circumstance occurs and I behave with consideration for others?

I'd like it to be now, I know it won't be and I geniunely think it won't be until I moderate my actions and behaviour in the future. I find this depressing, because it means there's another negative situation waiting for me in the future and I don't want to confront it. Also it's disappointing that despite my enlightenment (for want of a better word) right now, I can't claim the knowledge in practise as mine. Hence I am impatient too.

This is a depressing entry today, and I apologise for it. I'm just in that mood today.