michaelh20
Senior member
I went through the hiring process with a certain unamed telephone company occupying a big chunk of the U.S. to the N and W. I got through a spelling test, a basic customer service kind of test, 1 week of training, a pretty simple test and flubbed out on a "live test" in which I took calls live. Basically they throw you on the phones and if you don't do it their way and get the customer the right number you get the boot, and this is explained up front, so no complaints about that. I didn't think I was doing as bad as the testing person thought I was doing. I was just trying to get people the right # and making sure when I could find something..... but oh well.. at least I wasn't giving out Hardy's Plant Factory instead of Hard Bodies the escort service like some of the calls I got back. If anyone called 411 between about 11-12 CST, there were at least a dozen people on the phones by them selves trying to find things for people who might have answered the call. There were people who were available when we asked questions, but geez, I think it's strange to be upset about people being given wrong #s and no #s when you don't even sit an experience person down next to them for at least a few freaking hours.....
It was kind of interesting seeing how it all worked although it was not cool to be booted out the door because I wasn't doing everything exactly the way they wanted it done after 1.5 hours on the phone. I thought that telephone customers might be curious to know what a piece of crap ancient crusty database it is the this certain telephone company uses to service its directory assistance calls. It looks basically like some ancient terminal that they somehow hacked to get to run on Win 95, although with some primitive CUSTOM keyboard with a whole bunch of custom keys which they somehow attach to the PC. The whole input of all information is done through these perhaps 30 custom keys and key words, more or less. The entire input line on screenconsists of just a few text fields, more or less that never change and the output is some sort of terminal like text display that appears below the input line.
I say it is a piece of crap because depending on the order in which you hit the keys, the display changes and you see different results. Hence a search for Custom Computers yields different results from Computer Custom, although you can hit a key (on their customer keyboard) which changes these results. It's quite easy to search 4 different ways and come with 4 different results, so there is some fairly elaborate manner in which you are supposed to hit the various keys, tell the customer there isn't something there, and then if you are challenged you smack the keys some more to hack the display a little bit more.
I had one guy who actually was able to look up something in the phonebook before I could find it.
It's interesting to note that you can page forward, but you can never page back more than 3 pages. If you hit the keys in certain orders, the system can complain, resulting in you needing to restart your search.
They also hack various cryptic short cuts into the database, so mcd means mcdonalds, qw means well..., pt means point something.. just kind of tacky in general. They have the number 1 to match First anything, 2 to match Second and everything, etc.. They basically have a huge database filled with mispelled things so the real thing can be found quickly.
One lovely aspect is the fact that you aren't really trying to actually find the number, you just search however the customer tells you, hence if you say find me Custom Computers and it's listed some other way, there's some good chance that the person you are speaking to will not do an extensive search unless deliberately prodded and guided to do so. The only reason in my mind for this is to drag in the moola.
You also get billed even if they don't find anything (you get billed period for calling them at all), although it's easy to get a credit.
On the plus side it's a union job, although it starts off at a low pay 9/hr, and the ergonomics are well taken care of. Also it seems to be a pretty pleasant job in the customer service realm...
It was kind of interesting seeing how it all worked although it was not cool to be booted out the door because I wasn't doing everything exactly the way they wanted it done after 1.5 hours on the phone. I thought that telephone customers might be curious to know what a piece of crap ancient crusty database it is the this certain telephone company uses to service its directory assistance calls. It looks basically like some ancient terminal that they somehow hacked to get to run on Win 95, although with some primitive CUSTOM keyboard with a whole bunch of custom keys which they somehow attach to the PC. The whole input of all information is done through these perhaps 30 custom keys and key words, more or less. The entire input line on screenconsists of just a few text fields, more or less that never change and the output is some sort of terminal like text display that appears below the input line.
I say it is a piece of crap because depending on the order in which you hit the keys, the display changes and you see different results. Hence a search for Custom Computers yields different results from Computer Custom, although you can hit a key (on their customer keyboard) which changes these results. It's quite easy to search 4 different ways and come with 4 different results, so there is some fairly elaborate manner in which you are supposed to hit the various keys, tell the customer there isn't something there, and then if you are challenged you smack the keys some more to hack the display a little bit more.
I had one guy who actually was able to look up something in the phonebook before I could find it.
It's interesting to note that you can page forward, but you can never page back more than 3 pages. If you hit the keys in certain orders, the system can complain, resulting in you needing to restart your search.
They also hack various cryptic short cuts into the database, so mcd means mcdonalds, qw means well..., pt means point something.. just kind of tacky in general. They have the number 1 to match First anything, 2 to match Second and everything, etc.. They basically have a huge database filled with mispelled things so the real thing can be found quickly.
One lovely aspect is the fact that you aren't really trying to actually find the number, you just search however the customer tells you, hence if you say find me Custom Computers and it's listed some other way, there's some good chance that the person you are speaking to will not do an extensive search unless deliberately prodded and guided to do so. The only reason in my mind for this is to drag in the moola.
You also get billed even if they don't find anything (you get billed period for calling them at all), although it's easy to get a credit.
On the plus side it's a union job, although it starts off at a low pay 9/hr, and the ergonomics are well taken care of. Also it seems to be a pretty pleasant job in the customer service realm...
