I started my job two days ago as a customer support engineer trainee. I wonder why we are called engineers? If you look in the dictionary, engineers are defined as people who design and create stuff for the benefit of man. I wonder what are the things that we could create as a customer support engineer. Maybe we're supposed to design the perfect customer.

I'm already tired because we were on mid-shift today so I'll go straight to the point. I'm nervous and at the same time excited for my job. Although I'm still only on my second day, I believe I really have to exert effort if I want to survive my training. Just because it's only customer support doesn't mean it's easy and non-educational. People just stereotyped that because they can't accept the fact that customer support employees are much highly paid than them. I was mislead too. I thought that I could be lazy while earning money as a CSE, but I proved myself wrong. I'm working for Global Technology Solutions that services the clients of Cylynx, a company in the US, that is responsible for handling customer support services of several Internet service providers. Not only should I know how these ISPs work, but I should also know the terms and conditions on having an ISP account. I have to know about the services that our clients, which are the ISPs and web hosts, provide. On our first day of training, we were asked to memorize information about 9 different ISPs. We were asked to memorize all the services that those companies offer and how much they are charging for it. For example, for one client, Shadrach.com, we must memorize that they offer their unlimited Internet access at 56k lines at $17.95 for monthly billing, $53.85 for quarterly, $101.70 for 6 months, etc. etc... Aside from the rates for the ISP, we should also memorize the rates for their web hosting services. We should also must have knowledge about that ISP, we must know how it got started, where it is located, and even who is it's manager. We must also know the rules that they implement, such as refunds, charge backs and all those billing information. And that is only a quarter of the information from a single company - and we were asked to memorize nine ISPs. And we barely even reached the technical part! This morning, my mind is full of crap. And to make things worse, we got to listen to actual calls taking place, and it was very intimidating. In case I haven't told you this, GTS only accepts calls from the US, so all of the callers would be English speaking Americans. To make matters even harder, we couldn't tell them that we're in Manila and that we're not Americans. We must pretend that our office is located at Crystal Rivers, Florida, or on Charlotte, North Carolina, or wherever, depending on the company. They said if they asked for the location of our office, we should just tell them that we just moved there and we forgot how to get there.

We got to listen to a call taken by Anifa (I don't know how her name is spelled) and she has a very good command of the English dialect. She even has an accent. She can do normal English, country English, and even Indian English - Halu! Top that Popoy. Even the men have beautiful accents. They sound very... American - and I envy them. But they said that we shouldn't get intimidated. We'll eventually grow into it. Besides, they said that once you get the hang of it, it becomes fun.




Call Center Spoofs

Everyone makes a mistake but they told us to avoid making mistakes like these:

CSE: "Can I hold you for a minute?" Putting the client on hold.
Client: "You can hold me forever!"
Hehe... you don't have to hold your clients just to make them stay on the line.

CSE: "How can I do you?"
Client: "I think we're done."
Hehe... nice try! Since our ISPs are Christian ISPs, you can probably do you client missionary style.


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I also ran my journals on Textpad's Spelling checker recently. I just found out that TextPad has such functions and now I can fire my typist. And I also found out that Elvin was right, my site contains thousands of typos. Hehe... most of the mistakes were only typographical, promise... you have to believe me - or perhaps I intentionally misspelled some words... hehe....


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I can't seem to establish a connection to the net! DEMMET! Do they have customer support lines for this?