#not enough people are into phone customizing...

[stevishabitat]

From the perspective of a customer-facing tech support professional, I feel like panic is actually pretty reasonable at this moment.

My company doesn't even have a chatbot, but because they've become standard across our industry, there's no longer an expectation that there will be a live human available via chat or phone 24/7. So they've cut our hours, laid off all our overnight and evening workers, and lean staffed us nearly to oblivion.

The level of customer service across the industry is abysmal, but because so many of them are relying on chatbots, the bar for acceptable service is on the floor. I have managed to survive the culls because I was in the sweet spot of having enough experience to be valuable, but not enough seniority to be too expensive to keep. The layers of people above me and below me are pretty much gutted.

I can't even actually help my customers as well as I used to. Because I can no longer get in touch with publishers or distributors in real time, and there's no such thing as live tech support either.

All of that has been replaced with chatbots and automated ticketing systems neither of which can answer anything I need In Real Time, so it's a constant cycle of acting as a go-between and hoping to eventually get the answers I need in 1-3 business days. At which point someone's system automatically closes the ticket without doing anything at all and without any actual person having looked at it (probably because they're as understaffed and overworked as we are) and I have to submit another ticket or start over with the chatbot gatekeeper again.

I've been doing this for 11 years, and this is fucking DIRE. And although there was kind of a gradual drop in standards for awhile, I would say since about 2018 things have really accelerated and it's like 2020 was the excuse all the companies needed to just gut customer service to the bone. And the availability of chatbots and the acceptance of how BAD they are has changed the entire climate of customer service and tech support.

The attitude towards customer service in general just... Unbelievable. It's like every company is saying "yeah we know bots and automated shit is not actually good at helping people with what they need, but at least we don't have to pay someone to do it better, so I guess that's how it's gonna be"

And when that's the industry standard, there's no point in any one company trying to do better. Even where there are still humans on staff, without the network of other people across the industry, it means our hands are tied as far as what we can actually do ourselves.

And sometimes we talk amongst ourselves about where we could go if the pinch gets any harder, and there's just.... Nothing. I mean maybe I'm a fucking coalminer complaining about green energy stealing my job, but... Shit, I just like helping people with their ebooks so they can get an education. And apparently that's just not a valuable thing to aspire to anymore.

so like I said, I work in the tech industry, and it's been kind of fascinating watching whole new taboos develop at work around this genAI stuff. All we do is talk about genAI, everything is genAI now, "we have to win the AI race," blah blah blah, but nobody asks - you can't ask -

What's it for?

What's it for?

Why would anyone want this?

I sit in so many meetings and listen to genuinely very intelligent people talk until steam is rising off their skulls about genAI, and wonder how fast I'd get fired if I asked: do real people actually want this product, or are the only people excited about this technology the shareholders who want to see lines go up?

like you realize this is a bubble, right, guys? because nobody actually needs this? because it's not actually very good? normal people are excited by the novelty of it, and finance bro capitalists are wetting their shorts about it because they want to get rich quick off of the Next Big Thing In Tech, but the novelty will wear off and the bros will move on to something else and we'll just be left with billions and billions of dollars invested in technology that nobody wants.

and I don't say it, because I need my job. And I wonder how many other people sitting at the same table, in the same meeting, are also not saying it, because they need their jobs.

idk man it's just become a really weird environment.

[fuck-customers]

I guess this isn’t a fuck customers but do people have a total lack of common sense when they apply for jobs?

Some lady comes in wearing pajamas with her two grown ass sons who are also wearing pajamas with flip flops (at 2:00PM on a Monday)

She walks up to the register (cutting the line that has like 10 people in it)

She cuts me off mid-sentence as I am talking to the customer at my register

She doesn’t greet me, doesn’t ask how am I, she just slams her purse onto the counter and goes “are you hiring? My kids need a job” And she points to the boys who are on their phones and standing all the way by the front door

I look at them, look back at her (now she has her pinky scraping out earwax from her ear) and I told her we are not hiring, even though we are.

So she groans “ughhhhh NO WHERE is hiring”

Uhhh girl, lots of placing are desperate for employees but they want employees who are desperate to work. No job is desperate enough to hire people who show up in their pajamas and needs their mommy speak on their behalf. Get with the program.

Posted by admin Rodney

[i-cant-sing]

You know it’s kinda a good thing Baldwin and Salauddin didn’t live in the modern day with Tim traveler reader. cause can you imagine those two with cell phones?

Baldwin would be non stop texting. Every minute with new things to say to her. And it’s never paragraphs. No he’s texting single sentences at her.

Salauddin would be the worst to text. Like reader texts him a long paragraph about her feelings and he just comes back with “k.” And if she sends him pictures or anything he takes half the day to respond and even then it’s a dry one word answer.

ACCURATE😭😭😭😭

Cause imagine being in class or at work and your phone's just buzzing nonstop with Baldwin's texts, and you'd think it's because he has an emergency or in danger or something, but it's just him messaging you that he saw two pigeons today and they were cannodling and it reminded him of you, but then he got too jealous of the birds so he threw bread at them to scare them away. And there's a picture of him with the birds cuddling with the the text "aww! Miss u babe!🩷🩷" And then its followed by a video of him throwing bread canon balls at them with him laughing manically in the background and he texts "hurry up and get home before I destroy more animal couples���"

And then there's Salauddin and he's the driest texter ever. My brother could not for the life of him, keep the convo going and you could just be telling him the JUICIEST GOSSIP and he'd respond "Ok." And you would think that he just doesn't care about you enough to read your messages but in reality, you could actually quiz him and he'd tell you every detail to the T! He reads into your body language, the way you text, your tone, he studies you obsessively which is why he doesn't need to respond the way normal people do, lest you try to read between the lines and decide you don't like him. He just doesn't wanna give himself away. It's not that he's not good with words, in fact, he's an excellent poet! Salauddin would write the most loving poems for his beloved, but that's something he's saving for a special occasion, like... a wedding anniversary.

I also think that with phones and the technology, Baldwin for sure would keep tabs on you at all times! He's good at hacking, excellent at cyber security and breaching it. Besides, it's just sooo easy to get into your accounts, be just needs to make sure no creep is taking advantage of you.

As for Salauddin, while yes, he could have someone hack into your phone, he prefers to keep you safe by actually having professional bodyguards/assassins that are excellent at hiding in the shadows and being invisible to keep you safe from all the creeps when he's not around to punch them. Even when he takes you out on dates, that fancy restaurant is actually a safehouse of sorts. All the other customers there are hired professionals and their main job is to detect anyone who could target you or him. He has snipers on nearby buildings, ready to take care of anyone who tries to enter the closed off street to the restaurant with suspicious intent.

[kidfur]

you have got creature on your phone bottom!!!!!!

i do!! i downloaded a cool theme off the samsung store thingy that makes the ui purple and has little bears! ^w^

[thejax-reed]

"You know, for a detective, you sure do surprise me." Jaxon scoffed at her blunt dismissal. "Already ahead of you -my friend's used to patching people up. Keeping things in the down low." The set up might be a little..unsanitary but the beta was a happy customer himself and would make sure so was Jo. "McKenzie?" Jax frowned, catching his friend's voice on the other side of that call. "I sent you a location. Yeah..got a murky situation in my hands. My friend here's been attacked - she'll probably need transfusions. How fast can you make it?" Ten minutes. "Great..see you."

Reed put his phone away and carefully pulled the detective's body up so that he might stop her from sliding. "..our ride will be here in ten minutes." He nodded towards the corpse. "I'll take care of the ring and yeah, the bar too. You're not going to report me, are you? I've got enough on my plate as is."

"I've had worse…” Jo burbled reflexively, flinching at the bright light. She hadn’t, but even her woozy brain understood that treatment meant a hospital. A hospital meant questions and official records. Official records meant her superiors would learn of her solo run, and Jo was already treading on thin ice. "No hospital."

With the threat gone, it was becoming harder to stay awake. So much so that Jo startled when Jaxon spoke again, proposing an alternative solution she only heard half of. Bleary eyes focusing on a familiar shadowy figure near the mouth of the alley, she found herself nodding. "Mhm, yeah...”

“Her ring…” she murmured, letting her head loll to the side as she looked at Jaxon’s face. “You should take her ring.” The vampire's death had been self-defense. Kind of. But as long as it was human against supernatural, Jo knew she wouldn't get a fair trial—and by extension neither would Jaxon. “And the bar…” she added faintly, feeling the weight of exhaustion pull at her. It would be better if all they left behind was a pile of ash.

[oflgtfol]

im gone from michaels for like two weeks and when i come back the whole vibe has changed. Ughhh

[lameotello]

If Donnie ever turns to villainy it'll be customer service that did him in

[moonmargaritas]

ohhhhhh man do I have feelings about this one OP. The “for the cause” anti-tippers enrage me even more than the cheap people do. I’m seeing the same rhetoric surrounding self-order kiosks or phone orders that direct you to a central call center, that people should simply refuse to use these things and should insist on being helped by an employee. And I can tell y’all right now that that is not as helpful as you think it is.

I recently moved to a new state and got a job at a chain pizza place. I had worked for years at a different location in my home state. My previous location took all our phone orders ourselves, by employees of our exact store. To my knowledge that franchise is still holding out against the call center tide. We had four phones at the front of the store. We rarely needed all of them at once. We also staffed appropriately with the expectation that during rush hours, usually at least 1-2 people will be on the phone at any given time instead of making pizzas.

My new store uses the call center. We have one phone at the front of the store. Barely enough inside staff to even answer that consistently. If every one of our customers insisted on dialing through to the store and demanded we take their order personally, our lives would become a living hell. We don’t have enough staff. We don’t have enough phones. We don’t have enough space to install more phones. The common denominator for these ideas is that the ACTUAL EMPLOYEES, the people these fuckfaces are actually proclaiming concern for, bear the brunt of their shitty, selfish protest. We are the cannon fodder for their laziness. They don’t actually have to do any work, they just have to intentionally make our already hard and miserable jobs even harder and more miserable and go “well you should just unionize”

Service employees are not your accelerationist workhorses. If you’re not going to actually do anything material to help us, then go the fuck away and get your own damn pizza. Bastards.

I'm literally in an argument with male "leftists" who are actually trying to argue that the way to end tipping culture is to simply not tip.

That the business (that already made their profit from their presence) would change to a fair wage practice if people just stopped tipping.

So many of these dudes are digging their heels in on how it's the most principled thing to not tip and completely ignore me when I say- "Or how about don't go to restaurants?"

Crickets.

These businesses profit off of your presence and don't offer fair wages. Yet somehow all these men have all the "principles" in the world when they're smugly telling a poor wage worker they won't be tipping (and "it's for your own good")- But not principled enough to simply not go to those restaurants.

This motherfucker had the audacity to call that an irrelevant appeal to emotion.

This is why the American left is dead.

[homunculus-argument]

If I had more money than I'd ever spend in a lifetime, I'd spend my life operating a pizzeria at a loss. Something with the slogan of "it ain't italian but you're hungry" - and a statement of how this is not authentic italian pizza because the owner's estranged aunt's italian ex-husband would not serve pizza in his italian restaurant because as far as he was concerned, a pizza is the "just throw that shit together" dish that you make out of leftovers, and he would not serve that to paying customers even if they wanted it. True story btw.

But I'd just like to run a place where the staff is allowed to tell rude customers to fuck off. And if they're scared to do that, they can summon me downstairs to do it myself (this fantasy involves having my own apartment upstairs of the restaurant), because you don't fucking disrespect my staff like that. Develop a reputation as a place where You'd Better Act Yourself or you get nothing, which elevates the quality of the food in peoples' minds because it's human to assume that more work=more worth, and if a pizza place can afford to simply throw rude customers out, that clearly must mean that the food is just that good that going back is worth it anyway.

Hiring enough people to get the work done in a leisurely pace and occasionally have the time to chat with each other or customers. You just do the job I gave you in the time I gave you, don't steal anything and don't watch porn off your phone anywhere where the customers can see you, you're good. Don't care if you quit school at 16 if you can still mop floor. Don't care if you've been to prison because you killed some guy, as long as you're not doing that here. Don't care if you deal drugs on your free time as long as you don't bring your business to your day job. This place is exclusively for pizza business.

Have an item on the menu called "random pizza" - and if you order that one, they'll just throw in a mix of whatever ingredients we've got too much of, like if the bell peppers gotta be used before they go bad, every single random pizza is going to have them until they're either gone or need to get tossed. If you've got dietary restrictions or allergies, you gotta specify that while ordering, because other than that, random pizza is just whatever ingredients we need to get rid of. Surplus ingredients du jour.

Building a reputation as a place that's somehow simultaneously sketchy as hell but also remarkably high quality, getting five star restaurant customer service from a waiter with blue hair and stick-n-poke tattoos, there's a homeless guy at the back of the kitchen eating an order that nobody picked up, every surface is spotless and no matter how important of a suit-and-tie you are, if you won't behave yourself the owner will personally physically fight you.

[farawayfromdryland]

i need to go back to not thinking more than 10 days ahead as far as my life is concerned and also be much less employed

[fuck-customers]

I can tolerate helping customers with technology things that are specific to my store. Such as how to connect to the wifi (you have request to connect on your settings and then a popup will appear that asks you to put in your email + name to use the wifi. I just tell people to put "No No no@no.com" It is admittedly slightly complex) or how to navigate the store's website. It can get annoying and repetitive, but I can tolerate it because these are things that are specific to my job/store, so the general public would not organically know these things.

However it is not part of my job, nor will I make it part of my job to teach you how to use your own phone, including, but not limited to:

-walking you through step-by-step on how to access a website. And I mean "go to your browser. Well what browser so you have on your phone? Firefox? Chrome? Chrome is the one that looks like the Simon game. Firefox has a fox on the logo, hence the name. Ok go to the address bar. The address bar at the top of the page. That long horizontal white rectangle at the top of the page. The TOP of the page." Etc etc

-walking you through how to download an app in the same fashion as the above bullet. If you don't know what the app store is, you don't get the coupon. Sorry. I'm entirely too burnt out for this shit.

-straight up handling YOUR phone??? Hello? Do not hand me your phone. I don't know you or where you or your phone have been. I will not be touching it.

-similar to the last point: taking a screenshot/teaching you how to take a screenshot on YOUR phone? I'm not a tech wiz, but I think it's different based on what make+model of phone you have and I can't tell what kind of phone it is just by looking at it. And more importantly, I don't want to, nor do I get paid enough to.

-what your password is?? For your app or email? How the actual fuck am I supposed to know that? I don't even know you, but I somehow know your password? Based on the intelligence you're currently displaying, I would assume your password must be "ABCD1234"

There's probably more that I'm forgetting. I could kind of understand these if I was a tech support person or worked in a technology-based store, but I work in a regular ass store. The only connection we have to technology is that we have registers and phones in the store.

On iPhone The address bar is on the bottom in Safari.

But seriously I tell them I am not allowed to touch their phone per company policy. If they ask why that's a policy (and for some reason they all do) I say "a cashier once dropped the customers phone and the store won't pay to repair it, so to keep that from happening again we are not allowed to touch it."

C: "but the last one did it for me."

Me: If they want to break policy and risk their job that's on them but I can't afford to get fired."

-Rodney

[goron-king-darunia]

Not to derail because this is exactly correct and concise, but I would like to say that "higher than average call volumes" should not be happening from 10 AM to 6 PM if your offices are over from 9 AM to 6 PM. That's not how averages work. If I'm getting that message more than I'm talking to a human person, you need to hire more people. Our phones show us how long we've been on hold for. My mom was once number 4 in a queue when she called at 10 and they were experiencing "higher than average call volumes." She reached a human being after 4 hours. It took us about an hour to get our problem addressed. That means that there's at most 8 people there, but my bets are on 4 people fielding calls. I've played phone tag with these places getting my insurance sorted. Routinely takes an hour to reach a human being. My mom has called at 2 PM before and been hung up on at 6 PM while being next in line in the queue because, you know, they're closed. I don't think that's an acceptable amount of time to be spending waiting on a call.

Never forget that the reason they do this is because it costs money to have to pay people to sit at phones and answer specialized calls that require specialized information. The higher-ups' desires to pinch pennies are stealing hours from your life. Not to mention that sometimes the only other way to reach these people is by fax, which nobody ever uses anymore (I have sent 5-6 faxes on my mom's behalf to the correct numbers and the people on the other end routinely NEVER receive them, not to mention it takes hours at the Fed Ex to send the fax.) Or by mail. Which they never get back to you on. If you're very lucky, you may be able to reach someone by email. But most of the time, the only guaranteed way to reach a person who can handle your problem is to either go in person (if they're in another state, you're fucked) or to call. But unfortunately all call centers are like this.

If you're not angry, you should be.

You are not experiencing higher than expected call volumes. You refuse to hire sufficient staff to take care of exactly the amount of calls you should be getting as the facility you are.

[facts-i-just-made-up]

Not A Joke, Not Unreality:

A company called Quantum Fiber (under Century Link) recently set up my home town for fiber optic internet. I got them a month ago and aside from a few outages it was decent.

Last week, it went out. They sent me a super specific time it would be back-

They failed to make it and sent another, minutes later.

And another when that failed.

And over the week, more and more.

I called and they just read me the same email out loud. They offered no escalation or resources. Every time, they fail. I have not had internet for my house in a week, and this morning I got this one-

I looked into other people having the same problem and found this-

Edit forgot link

That's not something called a "766" line, that's them fucking up my city 766 times. This company is fucking shit, and I'm sick of this. I've filed an FCC complaint but those take a month to even get a reply.

So I'm hoping my 173,365 followers can help make this show of their ineptitude and callousness go viral. Please.

They are in a time of massive expansion into many new states and cities. I am asking anyone so inclined with a few minutes to spare to find your town or state's government information technology office or liaison, or just a local government representative of any kind, and write them a quick note stating that this company destroys town utilities and offers absolute frustrating failures of service in return.

If you have Quantum Fiber and have been similarly failed by them, please file an FCC complaint. You might at least get a free month out of it.

If you work with a news source or popular blog, please boost this however you can.

If you are on any app on which they are present, please feel free to write or tag them and let them know they have failed their customers and cities they work with.

Please do not engage in threats or harassment of any form. Keep this legal, civil, and proper so that it can create a legal basis and record of good citizen interaction on the part of this company's victims. I am asking for help in a grassroots campaign, not a violent or prank-filled heap that just gets people in trouble. AND DO NOT FOR ANY REASON EVER PESTER THE WORKERS, PHONE REPS AND TECHNICIANS THEY HAVE OUT THERE. This is the corporation's fault, not the poor folks they employ who they likely try to make take the backlash.

If you have any other ideas on how to hold a mega-corp responsible for the shit they put their customers through, please comment and recommend. I am sick of this shit. I know there are worse things happening and even worse companies doing horrid things right now. But maybe this one is new/small enough that a viral campaign can kick them where it hurts and get them to act more responsibly to their customers and safely to the places they work.

Please help if you have time. Please spread this in the hopes they see it and get off their butts and fix their horrible shit. Any random reblog or post on any platform might be the one their investors hear of.

Thank you anyone for anything you can do.

-Ari

[rosegardenofeden]

I think retail workers should be able to sit down in chairs and listen to music and goof around and chat with their coworkers and dick around on their phone when they have free time and not have to pay attention to every customer's little whim or be constantly on guard or perform happiness or clean and should be able to make out in the back rooms or go home whenever because theres enough people to cover their shift and just enjoy life and labor a little more. In my opinion

Edit: Terfs fuck all the way off this post forever and die

[zincbot]

i think if more one piece fans did their time as line cooks they would understand sanji better

[quecksilvereyes]

oh my god do not click links in emails that tell you to verify your data or your bank account gets locked or click links in messages telling you your safety protocol is ending, like, tomorrow, you will get SCAMMED SO BAD AND YOU WILL LOSE A LOT OF FUCKING MONEY never ever let anyone pressure you into giving away login information especially to your online banking by creating a sense of urgency oh my GOD

some things to look out for

1. spelling mistakes. do you know how many rounds of marketing and sales experts these things go through? if theres a spelling mistake dont click it

2. not using your name. if an email adresses you with "dear customer" or, even worse, a generic "ladies and gentlemen", it is most likely not actually targeted to you

3. verifying or login links. even IF your bank was stupid enough to send these to customers, dont EVER click those. look at me. they can legally argue that youve given your data away and thus they dont have to pay you anything back DONT CLICK THAT FUCKING LINK

4. creating a sense of urgency. do this or we lock your account next week. do this or your ebanking stops working tomorrow. give us all your money in cash or your beloved granddaughter will get HANGED FOR MURDERING BABIES. no serious organisation would ever do something like that over email or sms. ever. hands off.

5. ALWAYS CHECK WHO SENT YOU THE EMAIL. the display name and the email adress can vary a LOT. anyone can check the display name. look at the email adress. does it look weird? call the fucking place it says its from. you will likely hear a very weary sigh.

6. if its in a phonecall, scammers love preventing you from hanging up or talking to other people to have a little bit of a think about whats happening. there should always be a possibility to go hey i wanna think about this ill call back the official number thanks.

7. do not, i repeat, do NOT a) call a phone number flashing on your screen promising to rid your computer of viruses after clicking a dodgy link and b) let them install shit on your computer like. uh. idk. teamviewer.

7.i. TEAM VIEWER LETS PEOPLE USE YOUR COMPUTER HOWEVER THEY WANT AS LONG AS THEYRE CONNECTED. IF YOU DONT KNOW FOR FUCKING SURE YOURE TALKING TO ACTUAL TECH SUPPORT DONT GIVE ANYONE ACCESS TO YOUR COMPUTER.

fun little addendum: did you know a link can just automatically download shit? like. a virus? an app you can't uninstall unless you reset your entire device? dont click links unless youre extremely sure you know where they lead. hover your mouse over it and check the url.

thanks.