Thread by @patio11

In a strictly personal capacity, as someone very familiar with how to get things out of banks and who has operated under similar flow charts myself as a CSR in call center, I endorse the likelihood of those being “magic words.”

https://twitter.com/gringatears/status/1243244301754273792

One of the “magic words” for me, and this was in a retail-/SMB-facing e-commerce retailer in late 90s, was “health/safety issue.”

If you said that, I was supposed to give you anything I had within my (peon’s level of) authority or immediately say “Hold please” + escalate to T3.

We were instructed to not tell customers what the flow chart was, so we couldn’t say “I’m sorry about that [unrelated] situation. I can’t do that thing you want. I could do it, though, if this were a health or safety issue.”

“What is a peon’s level of authority?”

My salary was $10 an hour. I semi-routinely authorized “accommodations” which would cost the company on the order of several hundred dollars, but the authority was more tied to actions available than to cost of those actions per se.

T2 (“tier” 2) had some authority. T3 had some authority. T1 was not necessarily told precisely what those were; this information is on a need-to-know basis and T1 doesn’t need to know.

Incidentally: if you understand how an agent operates in a call center and why the process the agent was given looks like what it looks like, that is a Rosetta Stone to so, so, so many things in the world that look otherwise unexplainable.

I was a CSR during summers to pay for college and, although I did not appreciate it at the time, I learned more on that job than ~80% of my courses.

Oh, another tidbit from training.

Classmate: What if we think they’re lying [about the health issue]?
Trainer: Are you a doctor?
Classmate: No.
Trainer: That’s right. You’re not a doctor. That’s not your call. Your call is either to authorize an accommodation or pass call on.

This process is an engineered artifact. It is extremely, extremely aware of how much it trusts the judgement of its own T1 people and what the risks of them making the wrong call in the voice of the company are.

Since people are plausibly wondering “Wait how would this *ever* come up as a CSR in an e-commerce shop.”

Customer: “What’s the delivery estimate?”
Us: “2 days from today.”
Customer: “Can I get it faster?”
Us: “Well I see that you paid for two day shipping.”
Customer: “Well...”

Customer: “One of the things on the order is a new first aid kit for the office. We just hired a hemophiliac and...”
Me: *flowchart*
Before 3 PM: “I can upgrade you to next day shipping at no charge. It will arrive tomorrow.”
After 3 PM: “Please hold.” *calls warehouse*

Me: “This is telephone CS. I need a priority upgrade on order 135635 to arrive tomorrow. Is it still possible?”

If yes: “Thanks for holding. It will arrive tomorrow at no extra charge.”

If no: “Thanks for holding. I need to introduce you to a colleague who can assist you.”

This definitely wasn’t the only possible way to authorize an exception. It was an automatic one.

The canonical example of the judgement call part of the flow chart:

Customer has ordered birthday balloons for her daughter’s birthday. They won’t arrive in time. What to do?

Answer: Of course you authorize an accommodation on shipping the birthday balloons.