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Worked a mall kiosk in 2011, and I still miss the weird stuff people said in person
I sold those little remote control helicopters at a kiosk in a mall in Fresno back in 2011, and the job was mostly just talking to strangers all day. My favorite regular was a guy named Ray who came by every Saturday to tell me the same joke about his mother in law, and I laughed every time because he was so happy to tell it. Fast forward to now, I do chat support for a small online store, and every message feels like a script someone already wrote for me. Customers still say wild stuff, but it comes through in three lines of text with no face attached, and I can't tell if they're joking or mad. I got a message yesterday that just said "this is unacceptable" with no other words, and I stared at it for a full minute trying to figure out what happened. Does anyone else feel like the job got easier on paper but way lonelier in practice?
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lisa82012d ago
I had the same thing happen when I moved from waiting tables to doing phone support for a cable company. What saved me was picking up the phone more instead of always typing back, even when policy said chat was faster. Hearing someone's voice for thirty seconds tells you way more than a wall of text ever will. When a customer sends something short and scary like that, I started asking one simple question back, like "can you tell me what happened so I can fix it," and half the time they just needed to vent. The face part is real though, and I don't think that goes away. You just find little ways to bring it back, like a joke in the middle of a boring reply, and that got me through most days.
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