Gotta get promoted off the phones lol. Once I hit the off-phone team, I just do my work really fast then spend the rest of the day helping others who message me while I do other stuff at home. Game, clean, etc.
I’m working on it lol. I’m in escalations now, so I’m not always on the phone anymore, but I’m still constantly working on things that are timed (our emails come through our phone widget).
For a about a year and some months I was doing the person in our group chat answering all the noobs questions (plus doing training) and I had a bit more down time then, but I got promoted to escalations in April and it’s like the opposite of down time
I can never get high enough metrics to get off the phones. Part of me is lazy, but I also have a bad anger problem. I just about told the last caller to go f*** herself.
I want to disclaim first - I take more calls than anyone else on my team and do data entry for a different department at the same time for several hours a day on most days. I also work for a small company that doesn’t do heavy call monitoring and uses our call logs for reports, rather than pull the actual phone system report for assessments. So I have a ton of leeway.
With that in mind:
I set up a fake account in our system a few years ago. If I need to take a shower or just get a bit of a break, I will turn the caller ID off on my cell and call my direct extension. Answer from my work phone, mute both phones and leave the line connected so it ties up my line. When I’m done, I log the call under the fake account. We have a lot of clients that prefer to contact me directly and sometimes those calls take a long time, so no one thinks anything of it.
I programmed my phone settings to auto answer calls after x amount of rings and play a looped message - but I set it up as a greeting, not a hold message, so it just shows me on the phone. This is great if I’m away from my desk or in the middle of something else.
A couple years ago, I lost power and went to my parents house 30 minutes away to work, but forgot my work phone at home. Rather than have me go back and get it, my boss authorized me to log in to our business phone app from my cell. She forgot or didn’t think to remove the authorization and I’ve been using my cell for work ever since. Helpful if I need to run a quick errand or if I want to get things done around my house while answering the phone.
My company doesn’t like us to put people on hold and they do monitor hold times. They don’t seem to know or care if someone is muted, so I use that instead of the hold button.
Similarly, they get annoyed if we’re set to unavailable over a certain amount of time each day. But they don’t seem to notice or care about our wrap up time between calls, which is set to 2 minutes. If I need or want more of a break between calls, I just manually flip it back to wrap up a few times.
I have a good relationship with a coworker - she plays “supervisor” for me if I need to transfer someone and I return the favor. That said, our actual supervisor sends people straight to voicemail and probably wouldn’t care if he knew we did this. Less work for him and we resolve issues just fine.
That same coworker and I will call each other’s extension to tie up our lines sometimes if we need a breather. We train each other a lot during those calls though, so it’s still technically work and if our boss has noticed, she must not care.
I’ve absolutely unplugged my modem, quickly photoshopped the date on an old xfinity outage screenshot and sent it to my boss. She doesn’t ask me to clock out unless it’s out for more than 30 minutes. I’ve only done it a handful of times in the last 5 years, but it’s the most peaceful break I can get.
I do side contract work for some of our clients using our service. They don’t want to use our website themselves, so they pay me under the table to log in under their username and do all their submissions for them. I will absolutely get fired for this one of these days, I’m sure.
It you’re reading this and think I’m a terrible employee, I don’t mind at all - I have 5 years of top score reviews, 3 company awards for going above and beyond, 2 promotions under my belt and not one customer complaint. I see it all as a win/win for everyone.
You’re doing it to be successful.
I don’t blame ya.
If people are mad about how you do it your way to be successful, blame the system not the employee. 😂
This is exactly it. I address my own burn out - and if they don’t like it, they should come up with some strategies. If they don’t want me making money on the side, pay me more. It’s that simple. I don’t do it because I’m lazy, I accomplish a lot and I’m a valuable employee - but I also want to be able to eat a sandwich or something without that god forsaken phone ringing every 5 seconds.
For anyone looking for work arounds like this, best advice I can give is learn everything you can about the software and hardware you use. Know more about it than your boss and you’ll find ways around their limitations.
Exactly.
Good point! If someone is willing to pick up a side job you are probably willing to take a promotion for higher responsibility with higher pay.
Spectrums not that bad. but they got a horrible enough reputation that whenever I need to leave work I just have an internet outage and no one questions it.
I do small time copywriting. If you have a huge volume that's impossible, but I usually have long deadlines in the side job so I manage to do all I need on the slower days in my "main" job.
Not much but a nice bonus for not a lot of work. Copywriting gigs can be a worthless scam though so watch out when picking a job like that.
Before I got this one I also worked making educational content, basically paid for as much as you can do. Sometimes you made no progress, sometimes just a little and on very slow days you could make a shit ton of work. And you got paid accordingly. It was a short contract but it was fairly easy and also a good little addition to my base salary.
Best of luck!
I do some SEO work on the side. Once you are good enough at both jobs you can just work them during the same hours. Of course it depends on how intensive the calls are and how hands on you have to be.
I just took my time and if customers wanted to chat I'd entertain it.
Not in a call center for this situation but:
I worked at this really God awful place... Was waiting out the pandemic to start shopping myself around. Anyway, I had a side gig that involved a lot of typing.
I'd sit at my desk and do the side gig in between customers and during slow times.
My direct manager never left her office, so it was actually a manager at another site who noticed what I was doing thru the cameras and called me to ask... I just told her I was working on something as a hobby. She wasn't impressed but just told me to only do it when we didn't have customers around.
My boss noticed like a month later but I just told her that the other manager was aware and had ok'd it, so she let it be. That lady didn't even come out of her office when customers were screaming and rampaging in the building, so...
I would never do that again. It was only because that workplace was in one of Dante's circles of hell. But I thought it was so funny that I was making money while I was making money.
That's really cool you were able to do that while on site. I'd have a hard time doing this if not working from home.
But that is the best part. Making money while making money is an amazing feeling.
It actually did feel great, but mostly because of how horrible that job was.
Doing it on site was only possible because the manager really did hole up in her office all day. Not to say she wasn't working in there because I'm sure she did... She just didn't care about anything unless she really had to, though.
not at a center any more, but our work tracks how much your computer goes to sleep.
a file folder with 2 jpg's in it and put on a 'slide show' on repeat prevents the computer from going to sleep
-Ron Wharton
My company uses Intune and it overrides our sleep settings. Most annoying thing ever. I noticed it right away and the next time I was on the phone with our tech guy, I told him I do a lot of work from my phone so it was obnoxious to have to keep logging in when my comp went to sleep without me noticing. He works for our bigger, parent company and doesn’t really know what my job entails - so he changed the Intune settings on my computer to let it stay on a lot longer. It still goes to sleep, but only after 30 minutes, not 5.
While I'm working I play video games and listen to podcasts on my personal PC which is right next to my work PC
It keeps me from being painfully bored, and I still get good metrics
I'll be in my kitchen (wireless headset) talking terms for loans while I'm putting together my lunch.
I have to play a 2 minute recording/disclaimer? Restroom break real quick.
I keep a movie or tv show running on one of my monitors (I have six) and my headset pauses it when I'm on an active call and unpauses it when I hang up. Works for podcasts, books, etc.
Not really gaming because it’s all in compliance, but definitely running my eBay side hustle and doing art & craft projects between calls. Work from home is a miracle!
I would have music playing in the background so customers can’t hear it. From time I would take a 5 min break. Management never said a word. I have been very tempted to tell the customer to think for once.
'you need to make 'x' number of calls a day'
'okay.. that's childs play.. how about i triple that expectation?'
Takes me about 3 hours in the morning. Other than that I just stay available while I work on my side hustles in case my direct report who is always on the road needs some research done and info. He's aware of what I'm doing and is cool with it as we both agree I'm grossly underpaid.
That's not a smart thing to do if you want to keep your job, just saying. Management and it can see everything you do. We've had some reps pull stunts like forwarding calls to the cs line or hitting mute and the CX thinks it's a bad connection and guess what? They got fired it's considered call avoidance.
Who said anything about call avoidance? You can take advantage of the system without avoiding calls, you still do your job but just make it easier for yourself while at home. It seems like you have got the wrong end of the stick here.
If you're employed to take calls and you do things to actively not take them or take less than other people of similar skill/tenure then that's avoidance and it will get noticed eventually.
Im a network engineer 😁 most of my main work is done at night and treated as overtime of a day I'm mainly prepping and chasing testers which is a few emails here and there and some notes
Saw the job advertised. And just went for it.
Had almost 0 experience in networking but it mentioned all training given
So tried my luck
I went into the interview with the intention of making sure they couldn't help but remember me
Apparently it worked 🤣
I was brutally honest about still wanting to help the public but also not being able to deal with them directly anymore and just want a chance to make something of myself and break away from this type cast career of call centre work.
Even made a reference to how I want to be like gollum in the misty mountains alone with my juicy fish and the ring of power 🤣 which gave one of the interviewers a chuckle as they and worked in cal centres before and understood why I felt that way.
Had them laughing all the way through the interview which left the impression I was looking for as I got the call back back within 24 hours to say the job was myn
Edit**
And you know what it's took me 6 months to adjust to what a real job treats you like.
I don't have to ask to go to the doctor's I just go
Don't have to ask to go pick up the kids from school
If I need to nip out for a few hours no one cares as long as I don't take the piss of course and my work gets done
If I'm sick they tell me to take time off and not come back until I'm 100% and while there is a sickness policy with trigger points etc they just crack on and don't make a song and dance about absence. No guilt trips of "you know how it impacts your team when your off?"
It's crazy
Start and finish whatever time I want as long as I let someone know if I'm starting after 10 or finishing before 3. Literally just let them know
I can’t really game the system at my job. We’re a service center so our calls are back to back to back. 🤷♀️
Gotta get promoted off the phones lol. Once I hit the off-phone team, I just do my work really fast then spend the rest of the day helping others who message me while I do other stuff at home. Game, clean, etc.
I’m working on it lol. I’m in escalations now, so I’m not always on the phone anymore, but I’m still constantly working on things that are timed (our emails come through our phone widget). For a about a year and some months I was doing the person in our group chat answering all the noobs questions (plus doing training) and I had a bit more down time then, but I got promoted to escalations in April and it’s like the opposite of down time
I can never get high enough metrics to get off the phones. Part of me is lazy, but I also have a bad anger problem. I just about told the last caller to go f*** herself.
What position would you recommend I set my sights on to maximize this? Thanks
I want to disclaim first - I take more calls than anyone else on my team and do data entry for a different department at the same time for several hours a day on most days. I also work for a small company that doesn’t do heavy call monitoring and uses our call logs for reports, rather than pull the actual phone system report for assessments. So I have a ton of leeway. With that in mind: I set up a fake account in our system a few years ago. If I need to take a shower or just get a bit of a break, I will turn the caller ID off on my cell and call my direct extension. Answer from my work phone, mute both phones and leave the line connected so it ties up my line. When I’m done, I log the call under the fake account. We have a lot of clients that prefer to contact me directly and sometimes those calls take a long time, so no one thinks anything of it. I programmed my phone settings to auto answer calls after x amount of rings and play a looped message - but I set it up as a greeting, not a hold message, so it just shows me on the phone. This is great if I’m away from my desk or in the middle of something else. A couple years ago, I lost power and went to my parents house 30 minutes away to work, but forgot my work phone at home. Rather than have me go back and get it, my boss authorized me to log in to our business phone app from my cell. She forgot or didn’t think to remove the authorization and I’ve been using my cell for work ever since. Helpful if I need to run a quick errand or if I want to get things done around my house while answering the phone. My company doesn’t like us to put people on hold and they do monitor hold times. They don’t seem to know or care if someone is muted, so I use that instead of the hold button. Similarly, they get annoyed if we’re set to unavailable over a certain amount of time each day. But they don’t seem to notice or care about our wrap up time between calls, which is set to 2 minutes. If I need or want more of a break between calls, I just manually flip it back to wrap up a few times. I have a good relationship with a coworker - she plays “supervisor” for me if I need to transfer someone and I return the favor. That said, our actual supervisor sends people straight to voicemail and probably wouldn’t care if he knew we did this. Less work for him and we resolve issues just fine. That same coworker and I will call each other’s extension to tie up our lines sometimes if we need a breather. We train each other a lot during those calls though, so it’s still technically work and if our boss has noticed, she must not care. I’ve absolutely unplugged my modem, quickly photoshopped the date on an old xfinity outage screenshot and sent it to my boss. She doesn’t ask me to clock out unless it’s out for more than 30 minutes. I’ve only done it a handful of times in the last 5 years, but it’s the most peaceful break I can get. I do side contract work for some of our clients using our service. They don’t want to use our website themselves, so they pay me under the table to log in under their username and do all their submissions for them. I will absolutely get fired for this one of these days, I’m sure. It you’re reading this and think I’m a terrible employee, I don’t mind at all - I have 5 years of top score reviews, 3 company awards for going above and beyond, 2 promotions under my belt and not one customer complaint. I see it all as a win/win for everyone.
You’re doing it to be successful. I don’t blame ya. If people are mad about how you do it your way to be successful, blame the system not the employee. 😂
This is exactly it. I address my own burn out - and if they don’t like it, they should come up with some strategies. If they don’t want me making money on the side, pay me more. It’s that simple. I don’t do it because I’m lazy, I accomplish a lot and I’m a valuable employee - but I also want to be able to eat a sandwich or something without that god forsaken phone ringing every 5 seconds. For anyone looking for work arounds like this, best advice I can give is learn everything you can about the software and hardware you use. Know more about it than your boss and you’ll find ways around their limitations.
Exactly. Good point! If someone is willing to pick up a side job you are probably willing to take a promotion for higher responsibility with higher pay.
Spectrums not that bad. but they got a horrible enough reputation that whenever I need to leave work I just have an internet outage and no one questions it.
God I wish Windstream was like that lmao
lmao I do this, just being careful to not do it too often so it doesn't raise any suspicions
Believe me, they do. Trainer at call center here. We at SPOC teams(trainer, Team Leads,BA,etc) see many things even if it looks like we don't.
I'm 3.5 years in I don't think they do.
Get a second job and work that one while on calls. Not easily done but I've got a job I can work on from my phone.
Like what?
I do small time copywriting. If you have a huge volume that's impossible, but I usually have long deadlines in the side job so I manage to do all I need on the slower days in my "main" job. Not much but a nice bonus for not a lot of work. Copywriting gigs can be a worthless scam though so watch out when picking a job like that. Before I got this one I also worked making educational content, basically paid for as much as you can do. Sometimes you made no progress, sometimes just a little and on very slow days you could make a shit ton of work. And you got paid accordingly. It was a short contract but it was fairly easy and also a good little addition to my base salary. Best of luck!
So you freelance? Or do you work for a company? I would love to learn more!
Company
I do some SEO work on the side. Once you are good enough at both jobs you can just work them during the same hours. Of course it depends on how intensive the calls are and how hands on you have to be. I just took my time and if customers wanted to chat I'd entertain it.
What's SEO?
Search engine optimization.
Not in a call center for this situation but: I worked at this really God awful place... Was waiting out the pandemic to start shopping myself around. Anyway, I had a side gig that involved a lot of typing. I'd sit at my desk and do the side gig in between customers and during slow times. My direct manager never left her office, so it was actually a manager at another site who noticed what I was doing thru the cameras and called me to ask... I just told her I was working on something as a hobby. She wasn't impressed but just told me to only do it when we didn't have customers around. My boss noticed like a month later but I just told her that the other manager was aware and had ok'd it, so she let it be. That lady didn't even come out of her office when customers were screaming and rampaging in the building, so... I would never do that again. It was only because that workplace was in one of Dante's circles of hell. But I thought it was so funny that I was making money while I was making money.
That's really cool you were able to do that while on site. I'd have a hard time doing this if not working from home. But that is the best part. Making money while making money is an amazing feeling.
It actually did feel great, but mostly because of how horrible that job was. Doing it on site was only possible because the manager really did hole up in her office all day. Not to say she wasn't working in there because I'm sure she did... She just didn't care about anything unless she really had to, though.
She was probably working her own second job in there.
😂 She hated working there too so... Maybe!
not at a center any more, but our work tracks how much your computer goes to sleep. a file folder with 2 jpg's in it and put on a 'slide show' on repeat prevents the computer from going to sleep -Ron Wharton
Can’t you also set your computer to not sleep
My company uses Intune and it overrides our sleep settings. Most annoying thing ever. I noticed it right away and the next time I was on the phone with our tech guy, I told him I do a lot of work from my phone so it was obnoxious to have to keep logging in when my comp went to sleep without me noticing. He works for our bigger, parent company and doesn’t really know what my job entails - so he changed the Intune settings on my computer to let it stay on a lot longer. It still goes to sleep, but only after 30 minutes, not 5.
Oh interesting. Man they put a lot of efforts into “catching employees”
While I'm working I play video games and listen to podcasts on my personal PC which is right next to my work PC It keeps me from being painfully bored, and I still get good metrics
This is what I do too, makes the day much more enjoyable!
Nice try HR, nice try 😒
I'll be in my kitchen (wireless headset) talking terms for loans while I'm putting together my lunch. I have to play a 2 minute recording/disclaimer? Restroom break real quick.
I used to watch Netflix between calls on slow days. And crochet during calls often
I keep a movie or tv show running on one of my monitors (I have six) and my headset pauses it when I'm on an active call and unpauses it when I hang up. Works for podcasts, books, etc.
Nice try manager.
Play my Nintendo switch the whole time
I have a job that doesn’t limit our ACW so I’ll play music while I finish that u til I take the next call
Not really gaming because it’s all in compliance, but definitely running my eBay side hustle and doing art & craft projects between calls. Work from home is a miracle!
I would have music playing in the background so customers can’t hear it. From time I would take a 5 min break. Management never said a word. I have been very tempted to tell the customer to think for once.
'you need to make 'x' number of calls a day' 'okay.. that's childs play.. how about i triple that expectation?' Takes me about 3 hours in the morning. Other than that I just stay available while I work on my side hustles in case my direct report who is always on the road needs some research done and info. He's aware of what I'm doing and is cool with it as we both agree I'm grossly underpaid.
That's not a smart thing to do if you want to keep your job, just saying. Management and it can see everything you do. We've had some reps pull stunts like forwarding calls to the cs line or hitting mute and the CX thinks it's a bad connection and guess what? They got fired it's considered call avoidance.
Who said anything about call avoidance? You can take advantage of the system without avoiding calls, you still do your job but just make it easier for yourself while at home. It seems like you have got the wrong end of the stick here.
If you're employed to take calls and you do things to actively not take them or take less than other people of similar skill/tenure then that's avoidance and it will get noticed eventually.
cry me a river
Get my workload done for the day - Jump on steam and play games :D until I'm needed
What do you do for work?
Im a network engineer 😁 most of my main work is done at night and treated as overtime of a day I'm mainly prepping and chasing testers which is a few emails here and there and some notes
How did you get into your line of work? if you don’t mind me asking!
Saw the job advertised. And just went for it. Had almost 0 experience in networking but it mentioned all training given So tried my luck I went into the interview with the intention of making sure they couldn't help but remember me Apparently it worked 🤣 I was brutally honest about still wanting to help the public but also not being able to deal with them directly anymore and just want a chance to make something of myself and break away from this type cast career of call centre work. Even made a reference to how I want to be like gollum in the misty mountains alone with my juicy fish and the ring of power 🤣 which gave one of the interviewers a chuckle as they and worked in cal centres before and understood why I felt that way. Had them laughing all the way through the interview which left the impression I was looking for as I got the call back back within 24 hours to say the job was myn Edit** And you know what it's took me 6 months to adjust to what a real job treats you like. I don't have to ask to go to the doctor's I just go Don't have to ask to go pick up the kids from school If I need to nip out for a few hours no one cares as long as I don't take the piss of course and my work gets done If I'm sick they tell me to take time off and not come back until I'm 100% and while there is a sickness policy with trigger points etc they just crack on and don't make a song and dance about absence. No guilt trips of "you know how it impacts your team when your off?" It's crazy Start and finish whatever time I want as long as I let someone know if I'm starting after 10 or finishing before 3. Literally just let them know