The Wheel Squeaked

I just re-read the post I made yesterday and it seems I wasn't clear that the other members of the class had gotten their logins on Tuesday or Wednesday, so it wasn't like I was reacting to something that had just happened. It's just that yesterday, before I left, I'd been told it could be ten business days before I'd get mine, finally.

So today I made it clear to the trainer, who's a pretty decent guy thrown into being our trainer at the last minute, that being forced to wait ten days was unacceptable. We start at 7 a.m., which was when I spoke to him, and he said he'd speak to his boss when he arrived. A while later, I spoke to his boss - at his request - and let him know I was not at all pleased with the situation. I also explained that I'd decided to give the place another shot after leaving due to an unsatisfactory training situation the first time around. (At that time, I'd been on a type of call for about two years, and they were shrinking the number of people devoted to it. They gave us one whole week of customer care training, which really turned out to be only four days because on the second day we were joined by another group, so the second day was a repeat of the first.)

Around noon, just after we all returned from lunch, the trainer gave me a new ID number. It didn't work right away, but after he checked, he said try again after 20 minutes. I did, and got a bit further. It looks like it will take a while to get everything going, but others had that problem initially as well.

Also, from a brief conversation with the trainer, it looks like the client has woken up to the fact that you don't do customer service on a competent level that keeps customers by being cheap with the people who are actually wearing the headsets and talking to the customers. He said things could be improving within days. No idea how much of an improvement it will be, but he seemed somewhat impressed, so who knows.

So it looks like I'll be sticking around there for a while anyway. It is nice to be so close to home. We're supposed to have a half hour lunch, but things seem fairly relaxed in training, and the guy we've had this week has been giving us an hour, so I've been coming home for a while. We get a different trainer next week, so I'll pack lunch in case we only get the half hour.

Two weeks from Monday we start taking calls. It's always a nervous time, but this time I'll be going back to using a billing system I used when I was with the employer before, and Cingular/AT&T used the same system, although some of their implementations were different.