Wednesday, October 05, 2005

Sadism is Good!

I love Call Center Executives.

They are frustrated, workaholics, irritated and generally always stoic, just my type.

So, throughout last year, through my late night rituals of very late sleeping, I used to call up one of the numerous customer cares [Toll free, mind you] and bug the hell out of them.

So, I have tried to order pizzas using the Spice Customer Care, listed out to the Jet Airways people why Air Sahara was way better than them, giving them more than 50 reasons relentlessly, argued with the Hutch Care people that the owner of Hutch was not a tycoon in South Korea but some freaky king in Brunei.

My other exploits included try to persuading the Hewlett Packard people to send me a free Ink Cartridges as I was the CEO of a multi-billion company and wanted to test out its products. But the best of my adventures materialized in me trying to get an ICICI Bank credit card by telling them that I am get a salary of Re.45 and that I was the next Steve Jobs or Larry Page[ who also get a salary of $1] and that I was going to inherit Bill Gates’ empire as he was impressed my skills at C++ when he came to school, the frustrated kind lady simply slammed the phone down, thank you very much.

I once acted as thought I was the CEO of Spice and berated them about the importance of speaking politely to ‘our’ customers, the poor fellow almost believed me until I reminded him that which fool of a CEO stays awake at 2 a.m. and that I was just kiddin’ and kindly told him to get back to sleep.

Me, the sadist that I am, used to call up customer care center right in the dead of the night and asked them if the Call Center was up 24 hours or only at night. The Poor people would have cursed me like mad.
Damn! I am going to hell!
Boo Hoo!
Lucifer Here I Come!

These Call Center people are always very stoic, always.

What came as a pleasant surprise were the people from Nokia Customer Care.
Well, they log the name and phone number of each person for easier future reference. After having giving them the required details a previous time, when I called up the next time, a very pleasant voice in a wonderfully accented English said , “Am I speaking to Mr. Gaurav …. And is your number 2…….”. Well, since I was in a particularly nasty mood that day, I told that it wasn’t Gaurav but his “evil - twin brother” speaking.

And to my astonishment, the lady burst out laughing hysterically and continued to do so for quite some time until she shifted back to the Call-Center-Executives-have-to-be-stoic mode. It’s almost like Mr.Wemmick’s post box smile.
Sigh!

And nearly every Customer Care number has a different name by which they refer to their Executives.

Some call them ‘Customer Care Executives’, some simply ‘Agents’, some ‘Customer Care Representatives’, ‘Customer Relation Officer’ and everything under the moon except of course frustrated-irritated-person-who-would-wants-to-kick-ur-butt.

Man , Call Centers rule, unless ofcourse you work in one!

2 comments:

abhas1 said...

I totally agree!
call centres are fun stuff, but hey, how would I know...I don't work at one!!!

Anonymous said...

If you ever happen to work in a call center or customer support...
May you get of your own medicine you sadist ... As you sow so shall you reap.