I had training this week for the HDI service desk certification.
The first half was about how service desks are setup, ect. The second half was about customer service skills.
Now let me go back to Lexington. When I graduated college in Dec 02 I had a terrible time finding a job. Now you may say that lots of people have problems finding a job. I would argue that I had more trouble. I did some temp work and had jobs working for family but I couldn’t find my own full-time work. Two and a half years after I graduated I finally got a job with ACS in Lexington. It was for an inbound call center for a contract with Nextel.
Now I’ve never liked talking on the phone. No that is not strong enough I had close to a phobia of talking on the phone. I would panic if I had to talk to someone for over a minute or if someone I didn’t know called. So I really hated this job but I was so thankful to have one I took it anyway.
We had two weeks of training most of it was customer service intead of anything about the phones. Like I said I really hated this job but I had a lot of opportunities to practice my customer service skills with all the belligerent customers that called in.
The only way to put a happy face on it would be to say that wisdom comes from experience and experience comes from making mistakes.
Back to this week, most people don’t like to call a technical service desk because the computer people aren’t, “friendly.” This comes down to customer service skills. A lot of people get into the comptuer field because they are better with technical things than with people. The problem with that is for most people the first job they will have is in customer service.
So they go into the job with a lot of technical expertise but no customer service skills. I was the other way around. Even though I have a minor in computer information systems I really didn’t learn any practical skills from it. This is common for people who went to universities most of us are self taught. The job in Lexington did teach me a lot of customer service (aka phone) skills. This and my american FFA degree helped me get my job with SAIC. First I worked in Somerset on the NIH contract. When I started I had never used outlook before and that was the main issue. I was able to deal with the customers and I learned the reset on the job.
So when we had our training I was surprised that I already knew the importance of things like tone, phrases to make the client feel better, and other skills.
I may not have the technical expertise of some agents but I have a pleasant telephone voice and I am great a looking things up. Customers would rather have a pleasant voice that didn’t talk down to them than a person who knows everything.
