1) Screaming or abusing an agent over your problems will not get anything done. In fact, your name will probably go around the office as a known pain in the arse and nobody will waste time trying to help you. Call centres are hard enough environments to work in without talking to emotionally fragile idiots all day.

2) Asking for the manager when its a simple problem will delay you getting a resolution. Once a manager/supervisor name pops up on your file, any agent you speak to will automatically refer you back to them. This will be to your own detriment, especially in cases where the manager doesn’t have the expertise to help you (e.g PC issues).

3) Be polite. The person you are speaking to has probably taken 30+ calls already today and is in no mood to listen to someone who thinks they are calling a therapy line. Also note that even though an agent may sound interested in your problem, they will NEVER care about it. They just aren’t paid enough to invest that level of themselves into it.

4) 99% of the time “the customer is not right”. If you are calling a PC line for help, you obviously don’t know better than the agent you are speaking to so don’t act like it. Agents take more joy in picking apart the flawed knowledge of a know it all customer than you could ever imagine, so don’t fall in to that trap. You’ll end up as a coffee break joke.

Alot of centers will give you a tracking or incident number and it is extremely vital you get this information so that a callback has a reference point and you don’t have to go through a thousand hoops again.

Get the agents name, and employee number or id if possible as you may be able to be forwarded to this same person, who already is knowledgeable about your issue or if they gave you incorrect information you can give this to a supervisor and the agent can then be trained properly.

If the procedure had allowed the agent to skip right to “hold down the power button for 10 seconds,” it would have saved the agent abuse and Dell money by allowing the agent to move on to another call.

Sure, the guy was abusive. The agent deserves a medal for taking that. Doesn’t change my view on the waste-of-time questions however.

Yelling at the rep will get you nowhere, asking for a manager will most definitely slow the entire process down and no one really in really impressed that you are asking for a manager anyway. The first team I worked on, before I joined data support, had a supervisor who wasn’t even familiar with our primary billling system because she had been brought in from an acquired company and hadn’t been trained on the system yet. What good did it do anyone to speak with her?

A rep won’t necessarily get fired just for hanging up on a customer. The call had to be recorded and observed, and not all calls are, and then there is generally a termination/discipline process that involves the rep, his/her supervisor and human resources. If labor is unionized the chance of termination is greatly diminished, especially in circumstances where the rep was suffering serious verbal abuse. There may be coaching or discipline, but termination is not always automatic. At my company the official policy is to attempt to calm the irate customer, and if all else fails put the person on hold and transfer the call to a supervisor. The supervisor can hang up if necessary, but they rarely do.

Finally, you may or may not be able to obtain copies of tickets. You most certainly may not have copies of the notes in the company’s systems. At least, not without a subpoena. Notes are considered proprietary.

I get the same thing occasionally. I’ll call in with an informational question. I’ll *calmly* explain that my question has nothing to do with my personal account, and I can usually get the agent to skip all the questions about my account.