Wednesday, December 30, 2009

I'm going to buy a stopwatch

Sometimes I try to see how long the customer can talk without any interaction from me.

It's like they're having a stroke. Even though they stay on topic at first, it quickly degrades into minutia of their day, the problems they're having in life, the status of their family, the weather, possibly the clothes they're wearing, and then I'm pretty sure they just start saying the names of things they can see.

I really should get a stopwatch though, just because the most I was able to identify was four minutes, and this was after he was talking for so long I had to watch the time.

2 comments:

Davidwhitewolf said...

Heh. My record's twenty minutes without saying more than "uh huh" from time to time. Granted, by the time I'm talking with them it's an escalated customer-service call, and our customers by definition have lots of drama.

Fletch said...

You can't say "uh huh!" That's cheating! If I could get away monosyllabic grunts of acknowledgment I could probably get that high too! (I'm just jealous)

I like the perfect silence because I could have easily been disconnected, and I like to draw out the realization in the customer that they may have just been talking to themselves for the past 5 minutes. >:]