Struggling to wake up early…

My dear readers and followers, on the last post I told you a little bit about myself and some of my daily battles at the call center. But also working at a call center has helped me a lot in working on my own abilities and habits, one of those habits was to wake up early, since at the call center at 07:00 am we need to be already-ready to be taking calls for sure I needed to wake up at least at 5:30 am to get everything done and ready to be at the phone at 7:00 am. The call center gave me the structure to my daily routine that I was missing because I consider myself a creative person and I have always had a really hard time organizing my time and getting things done. So… after almost 7-8 months at these call center, I almost have a defined routine, though sometimes when waking up that early I feel so tired during the day.

At the call center my resting days are not as the normal people usually have, because I really have a long day routine starting at 7:00 am and finishing at 18:00 or later, so there are more than 8 hours journey a day a little bit tiring at the end of the day, and my rest days are Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday, feels like a really more long weekend because I rest 3 days, but… the rest of the week you feel that the day will not last that long to finish everything you need to do… make your food and meals, do all housekeeping, having everything at home perfectly good, hahaha….

Since my life as you have been reading in the last posts is always in a rush, in a constantly change looking for better job opportunities and I am always that type of person who gets really bored about doing the same routine every day, I am always that persons who love learning new things all the time, new stuff to do and work to get done, I need to confess that I have just started a new job in which now I am taking care of online exams (proctoring) for online certifications, so… I am still in the customer service area, but my routine has come a little more relax again. BUT…. I really need to tell, that considering that I am really bad at managing my time… what I miss from working at the call center is that great structure and defined strict times I used to have because helped me a lot with the managing of times… I am really missing that and now I do have a hard time trying to keep the  “waking early routine” I used to have.

I am constantly trying to adapt myself to new changes and new routines, but sometimes I am struggling to get back to that path because also I realized that my body is feeling really tired about all the stress I used to manage at the call center, the few hours of sleep I used to have somedays… so now just trying to get again a new routine and try to keep up with all the good habits the call center taught me on the last months…

Of course, I still have my own projects in which I am working on the few free hours I have, and since my major was in business administration, but I love social media and digital marketing, you can now imagine I also need to spend some of my time learning these new whole bunch of information and studying these new role job opportunities for my own businesses.

Here I leave you an interesting article on how to wake up early that liked me a lot because they explain the step by step routine to achieve it. You know I always consider life as a roller coaster, and business is always about innovating, changing, adapting, or dying for it, but never surrender no matter what, surrender has never been an option.

Working in a call center multicultural environment

My dear readers and followers, I am really sorry for what is going on these days in the United States about the protest, the racism, and the abuse of power by police members… But also I will reflect on an article I read from another colleague, co-worker in the call center. Unfortunately, these actions and protests happen sadly all around the world, and for sure is a matter of concern because WE ALL are HUMANS, the word <human being> does not know anything about: races, colors, ethnicity, roots, ancestors, predecessors, country, place, affinities, and I can continue this list forever…

It is just a small thought I will like to share with you because racism has always been a problem, especially about the abuse of power… Not only from the police but with any person in the role of “authority”. In the last 8 months, I have been working in a call center, and though I live in Mexico, and I am Mexican all my customers and the calls I attend to and solve problems with are all customers from the United States, I really love this role because now I see how much my English and pronunciation also my vocabulary have grown a lot.

I will like to tell you a little bit more about my experience with the USA culture because even though I have a really good English and pronunciation, for sure I am not a native speaker but I have had the opportunity to teach English to children around the world and get to know different cultures, and so sorry for that but all around the world racism happens. I work at a call center here in Mexico, and all my customers are from the USA, so all my calls are in English, I do have many customers who have told me that my English is pretty good as if I were a native speaker, I have laughed with some customers, I have cried with some others regarding their personal situations, but… I have also witnessed and felt racism in my own skin, especially when I get nervous because I do not have the <exact or correct answer> to some questions, which of course I am human, and even though I KNOW MY BUSINESS, sometimes there are questions I am unable to answer or solve.

I have been told by some customers during a call asked me or told me: “you are probably from Pakistan” (as if being from that specific country was an insult), or worst “you probably work at the Philippines” (what an insult to be from the Philippines) but for sure on of the most racist and worst comments I have received were: (me being Mexican, and I do not need to tell my customers where I am located unless they ask me directly).

• While troubleshooting a remote “This remote is not working, took off the batteries, placed them back, and said, Oh! this remote was made in Mexico, that’s why it has bad quality and stop working” (me… in my head Mexico bad quality? ok… must of your cars are assembled in Mexico, just for your information)
• While answering some questions to another customer “you really don’t know how to speak English, and what is worst… since you are Mexican please contact me to someone in the USA who knows how to do his work correctly”
• Another customer who felt with “power” to insult and “demand”: “you definitely don’t know how to do your work, and yes I am laughing at you in your face (with his wife also at the phone) and I use to work at that Company were you work and I know how this works so you better do what I ask you to do, please transfer me to your manager”
• When a customer asks “are you American?” my answer to him/her is “YES, I am. (Mexico is part of the American continent as well as Canada and the United States) then I received as an answer “Thank god you are not Mexican, I hate speaking to Mexican people” (in my head, so sad to hear that because I am truly Mexican but I cannot say that to you…)

Still… I also have really good and grateful customers those who really make my day and like my job and do the best effort we take in to make each of theirs calls the best experience ever, make them laugh, connect with them, and hear them how thankful they are for us to solve their problem at that moment. But sadly racism is not only about Afro-American people, about Arab people, Chinese people, Philippines people or Latin people is also and must about our values, about what we believe, what we have learned in school, what we see in our families, and what the systems have told us <what is right, and what is wrong, what to accept or what to reject> What about what we truly believe, want and desire because we are all HUMANS.

I will just give you this small though, to think about what we truly want and believe, what we want to leave behind us for future and next generations, what about a world filled with love, companionship, respect for each other’s life, friendship, equality, but most important of all our own FREEDOM: to speak, to live, to have a job, to have access to food, water, a place to live <home>, to dignity.

Thank you so much for reading my post and for your support in my blog, In this complex times we are living and now that we need to sum up this complexity with COVID19 and racism, violence, the desire, and pledge of many, including myself for CHANGE, real change in our society and in humanity <me, I am a Dreamer> Nothing has become more important than ever as Martin L. King told once in his speech “I had a Dream” (a public speech that was delivered by American civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963, in which he called for civil and economic rights and an end to racism in the United States).

DREAM BIG! 

 

Keep up with metrics…

Hello! My dear readers and followers, as I was telling you on my previous posts my working life at the call center has been really challenging especially in what technical issues are about hehe, definitely that has been the most difficult part for me! But I am doing my best to keep those problems and those issues under control for my customers.

What for me has been really complex regarding these COVID19 times is to keep up with the metrics… It is not like when I was back at the office and whenever I had a question or doubt I will just turn around to another co-worker or agent to ask about how to solve a problem, or just walk a few steps and ask any support or supervisor, but… Now that we are at home office is much difficult when you have a question, because you cannot respond and solve as fast as before, and there is the complexity because now we need to do all the research by chat, and WhatsApp which is really helpful but not that fast at all… You can imagine, if we only have between 15 and 23 minutes to get a problem solved during a phone call but…

• You need to wait for the answer of your question to be respond “at the chat” and then left the customer on hold but no more than 2 minutes (for curtesy, so every 2 minutes we shall say to our customer “please wait another two more minutes… like 2-3 times) so at the end, your response arrived on the chat <5-8 minutes after you asked> what is worst…
• You definitely need to transfer the customer to another department, because of course there are specific agents depending on the complexity of the technical issue, so… Guess what? another waiting time of 15-20 minutes for the customer (considering that the phone call is not lost or dropped during transfer, and the customer will call back again) on my call center us/agents cannot call back customers, we do not have that option available.

At the end, your time for solving some of the calls definitely is not 15-20 minutes because you will need to sum up and the time if:

• Call drops during transfer and customer calls back again
• The time that the customer waits on the line for the transfer and the time spent with the second or third agent.
• The time you take to have a question answered at the chats

Considering these last comments at the end keep up with metrics that have been challenging these times and also we depend on the perception and the comments our customers put up on the surveys they got by e-mail.

So… you can imagine sometimes my stress is too high to keep up with all these metrics, especially those which for sure not depend directly on me. And the challenge to wake up at 5:00 am this last month, has been set up for a second goal as long as I can get this resolved for the metrics and at the call center, still, I work from 7:00 am to 18:00 pm.

I will be telling you more about my personal experiences and how these 8 months have been enriching not only in my professional career but also in my personal life.  Especially because I been really having a hard time finding the fine equilibrium between my personal life, my own projects (which I will talk to you about them later on in this blog), manage my time correctly, and my professional life and work. How you ever been in this situation in which managing your time correctly has been difficult?

Working in a call center during COVID19

Thank you for reading my posts! This encourages me to keep writing my story, and if you can learn from it or do things differently the way I did them you will have gain more experience faster than me hehe, and that is excellent and awesome. Sometimes we are teachers, sometimes we are students in this amazing path we all call life.

On my last post, of every Thursday, I have talked to you a little bit about what I am on right now in my personal and professional life, and working at a call center has been challenging and enriching at the same time. Always working with people requires a lot of personal skills, especially when the interaction is just by phone and you are not able to see the other person on the other side of the line at the phone, hehe. Imagine if working with people and customers face to face is a challenge, it is more challenging working by phone and giving excellent customer service and experience.  It gets a little more interesting when you need to take into consideration all the different ethnics, and accents to which you are exposed to is just simply amazing the cultural diversity around the world.

Now that COVID19 has come to our lives to stay, we must be taking all the correct measurements on our offices at the job and with our all work stations. I am really thankful because sometimes these measurements get a little more complex and difficult to adopt in a call center, at the beginning none of us had a computer assigned so every day you will come to work and sit on the available station to receive your calls, for one moment we thought we were going to be sent home without-payment until the situation will get better… Fortunately for us, and for the company I work for did all that was on their hands to send the biggest number of colleagues home, I am really really grateful for that titanic work and for being able, considering everything that is been happening worldwide, to have a job, to be able to work from home, and always give an excellent customer experience. Thank you very much for that effort!

This has been awesome for me because I have been able to practice my English on a daily basis getting to learn new vocabulary and try to understand each of my clients, connect with them which in some cases gets a little bit complicated, but always solving problems and questions. I rather say, that at the beginning of my new job at the call center I started as a customer service representative, but after 3-4 months of customer service, I was trained in the technical part of the equipment we work with and really I been having a hard time in the beginning… why? Well, I have never been a tech-savvy person and also never been that interested in video games, computers, cables, TV, and engineering stuff, so… There is still my challenge! Always learning new ways to get the problem solved for my customers, sometimes I learn together with them while doing all the troubleshooting (but, that is something they don’t know, so please don’t tell them that, hehe..) other times they ask to me questions that not even me or my tools are able to resolve but still we show confidence because for sure, WE KNOW our business! Do any of you who are reading this post have you ever feel this way?

For example, sometimes they call about some specific issue but it is amazing that before we start troubleshooting all of a sudden the problem solved on its own, Boom!  Some of you most feel identify with these situations, please let me know one experience that you have had like these? It will be awesome for me to read you back. In the next posts, I will be telling you about the book of the 5AM club, which I am having a hard to make it a habit in my daily routine to wakeup every day at 5:00 am… Stay tuned!

New beginnings, new challenges

In the last post, I was telling you about the last changes that happened in my life the last year, with less time for writing, a lot of work of consuming hours and also a lot of learning. At this precise time in my life, I am working in a call center, I never imagined myself to be working there, my thoughts, my dreams, my options I thought they were different, each day and month that passes by for me feel like I found my self going in the opposite direction I ever wanted to go, and living a life I did not want to be living because for sure is nothing compared to what I ever dreamed of for me. Still, I am learning a lot of things about myself the, my light and my darkness, finding and working every day on the things and the habits I will like to change, to keep learning and keep growing, it has not been easy, especially when I wanted to be somewhere else or doing something different for a living.

The Call Center, as told you on my last post has been a lifetime adventure and a hard challenge to face in the last 7 months.  I will start telling you my story starting from the beginning…

When I got fired last year in October 2019, I started looking for a “temporary work option”, at least that is what  I thought at the beginning when I decided to apply to the call center and all the process was indeed really fast, smooth and simple. After 2 days I was already working there taking calls as a bilingual agent, that is exactly where my adventure started and I will be explaining to you why.

When I started working at the call center in November 2019, I was still living at my parents’ house, and the call center is really far away from where they live. One of the first decisions that were needed to be taken, was to change to live near where the new office is located now. To tell you a little bit more of my story, my boyfriend and I already months ago talked about living together again, we did it in the past on 2017, but for both personal reasons and money needed to go back to our parents’ house on that time. At this present moment, everything the call center, my new job, the new office too far away from where I was living, the traffic in this lovely Mexico City and all the present situation, we needed to act fast and take decisions that will change everything from that day on.

Photo by Burst on Unsplash

After reviewing all our options, we have been looking for apartments since May 2019, but now we needed to act quickly and make the best decision for both of us, our lives, and our professional careers. I will make a parenthesis here in the story, because definitely when you are focused and have the mental clarity to make any decisions life is wonderful and the best options and the best deals come into your perspective like they just pop-up right in front of you to embrace them because they are THERE FOR YOU! Just take them and make them your own. That was exactly what happened to both of us, after 2 days I started working at the call center and after 3-4 months looking for an apartment to share, the perfect option appeared just right in front of us and surprised us with an excellent location, near of our jobs for both of us and what is more enjoyable of all the amazing price we are paying for the rent.

For sure I do not have yet the economic independence that I will like to, but going back to live with him opened to me a different view and perspective of the whole situation I am still living at this specific point of my life. I love my parents, but it was also necessary to put some distance within them, as we have already talked in some of my other posts, sometimes family can stop you to going for that desired dream, not in purpose but because they want “the best’ for you and most of the times your best is different from what they expect it to be. In this case for me was a complete relief, because I am still in touch with them, and see them really often, but sure I needed my own space to develop my ideas and my own projects.

Some of the complex parts of going back to live with my boyfriend are that in that year that we were far apart is like recognizing once again the person you fell in love with, is a new space, new rules, new ways of distributing the house payments, meals, and constantly getting to agreements to live happily and in comfort with each others company.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

I cannot even start to realize all the changes I have been trough in the last 7 months, for me have been like a lifetime, it meant a change in my routine and habits, adapting to a new space, to his own new habits, so it has not been easy to assimilate everything all of sudden, still, I am happy because I have my own space and now we both can establish a new routine that will work for both in this new beginning.

A clear example of the changes in my routine is that on the call center at 7:00 am I need to be connected and ready to start taking calls, different from when I was in other business that we started at 8:00 or 9:00 am, so this has been really challenging because in order for me to be ready at the office at 7:00 I need to be on my way to the office at 6:15-6:30 in the morning.  Some of the big differences that I do like from working in the call center are that when you finish your shift there is no “extra work” to be taken home, so you really earn the rest of your day-time. Adapting to all these routine and changes has been a great challenge for me and my boyfriend, but fortunately, he has been so empathic and supportive, I really appreciate that from him, especially because my days-off are on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays and work on Sundays, so you can imagine the crazy whole thing haha.

On my next post, I will be telling you about how we have been doing along with this COVID19 pandemic quarantine that has had some benefits like working from home and giving me still a little bit more of personal time to enjoy and to work in some other projects that I will be speaking to you about on next posts, and for sure about a new routine that both of us is now trying and is called the 5:00 AM CLUB, a really interesting concept we started working on, so stay tuned for more of our adventures in our crazy lives! We still are working in that desired business life dream, but we are still on our path and working hard to discover, keep learning, keep growing and most of all keep sharing with others our experience through it: adaptation, changes, re-organization.