OLIVER JORDAN SIGHED AS an electronic tone sounded in his ears through the headset. He wasn’t a big fan of the headset. It was new. The old ones were more comfortable. The new ones made his ears sweat. He wasn’t sure why the company had changed headset vendors, but Management tended not to solicit his opinion when they made the really big decisions.
It was a shame really; Oliver had only been working for the company for thirteen years after all. He liked to think his opinion mattered; he liked to think he mattered. He’d learned long ago however, that in Corporate America, all that mattered were the numbers. Oliver was a number, and as long as he didn’t make any waves, he would forever remain a number.
The tone in his ear signified an incoming call; that someone, somewhere in the country, had picked up their phone and dialed a 1-800 number found on the back of most products that sat on the shelves in your local department or grocery store. The tone also meant that Oliver had to answer the call, and so—as he had done over a hundred times a day—Oliver opened said call using the scripted greeting he’d received back on Day One of training all those many years ago.
“Solutions Incorporated, this is Oliver, how may I help you today?” He gave his belly a small scratch.
“Which product are you calling about?” Oliver said.
This was how many of his calls began. Oliver—Ollie to the people that didn’t know him all that well—worked for a privately held company called Solutions Incorporated. They were a customer service firm who hired themselves out to handle most of the 1-800 help lines you see on products.
Similar businesses, and there weren’t many, have a different 1-800 number created for each of the companies they were contracted to service. That way the operator knows, when a call comes in, which product company the customer is calling about. This helps create the illusion that the customer is speaking with the manufacturer of the product they purchased, and not some faceless corporation such as the one in which Oliver worked for.
Solutions Incorporated, unfortunately, were too cheap to pay for multiple lines. This meant that many of the calls taken each day by Oliver and his fellow representatives in the cubicle jungle started out with the operator convincing the caller that they had, in fact, called the correct number.
Oliver sighed, but only on the inside. Customer Service 101: Never let them hear you sigh.
Ham patties meant a Yummy Tum product. Oliver worked the mouse like a pro and in less than two seconds had the Yummy Tum product file open and began to toggle through to the ham patty designation. As he pulled the information he attempted to engage the customer.
Engagement is one of the primary keys to good customer service. Of the many roles that the well-qualified customer service representative is tasked to perform during the life of a call—Subject Matter Expert, Voice of Reason, Detective—the Engaged Listener role allows the representative to show his or her customer that they are involved. Within moments of the greeting, the customer should feel that the representative’s sole purpose in life is to help and that the only two people alive in the world during the length of that call are the customer and the customer service representative.
Oliver—being the professional that he was, and with over a decade of experience under his belt—had a wide variety of tricks he’d cultivated over the years; sure-fire techniques he would often employ when acting in the role of Engaged Listener. So, with the speed of a billion dollar super computer, he pulled the perfect engagement technique from his bag of tricks and lobbed it softly over to the customer on the other end of the line.
His technique inspired only the best from his fellow coworkers.
“Okay.” He could relate. The Yummy Tum ham patties were damn good. Too good, in fact. Oliver had spent many years indulging on them, which hadn’t been good for his figure.
Oliver wasn’t fat, at least he wasn’t what medical science would call morbidly obese. He did, however, meet the clinical definition of overweight, but as he thought about those ham patties, as he scratched once more at his belly, he gave it a bit of a pat and watched it jiggle and shake like the proverbial bowl full of jelly.
“Right.” Oliver sat—to be honest, he lounged—in a cramped cubicle of four-foot high walls covered in pictures of his family and all of his favorite Mighties.
“Take your time,” Oliver stood, snatching the yo-yo from off the desk where he kept it next to the monitor, slipped the string over his right middle finger, and let loose, the yo-yo spinning to the end of the string and back with the quickness of a bullet train.
If there is one thing that Oliver has learned from sitting in the same cubicle for over thirteen years and taking the same kinds of calls day after day, it’s that if you don’t have something around you to take your mind off of the tedium, the job does things to your mind.
He’d become pretty good with the thing over the years. He could walk the dog and go round the world and all that, which he figured in the end was better than spending the rest of his life in jail.
“Okay, found it,” the caller returned.
Oliver checked his calendar before responding.
“It sure was,” he said.
He always took that extra step to ensure that everything he told a caller was factual and correct.
There was a long pause from the other end of the phone and for a moment Oliver thought the caller had disconnected.
“I ate the ham patties,” the caller said, his voice small and embarrassed.
Once again, Oliver engaged the mute button for a good sigh, a sigh of such magnitude that small herds of gazelle could live upon its surface and graze among its open fields of waving grasslands.
“Yes sir, I believe under these circumstances that it would be in your best interest to hang up the phone and continue at once to the emergency room of your local hospital or possibly even a walk-in urgent care facility.” Oliver continued to smile.
The call ended and Oliver let out another sigh of exasperation. This would not be his last sigh of the day. If things went as per usual Oliver could look forward to many more sighs before this day would end.
He took off his headset and placed it on a hook which hung from the wall of the cubicle. Then he pushed a button on his phone labeled AUX, which put the phone in a state that would not allow any incoming calls. He then grabbed up a small cooler from under the desk, and went off to eat his lunch, unaware that before this day would end, Oliver Jordan would become one of the most powerful men in the world.