Confessions of a Sales Administrator

(Josiesayz: Today, at work, I was thinking about all of the things customers and clients do that are frustrating. I have previously made a ‘Confessions of a Waitress’ (in three parts) and a ‘Confessions of an Office Assistant’. Please note that the company name has been changed and any names used below are fictional, but all of the events are true.)

Biweekly, I have customers contact me, chasing where their order is, if it is out for delivery yet and why they haven’t received it, when they have not paid for it yet. I am really sorry, but if you have not paid for your order, we cannot manufacture it. I always reply with, “I am sorry, but I have not received confirmation of payment. Please can you confirm to me what day you paid and I will have our accounts team verify this and send your order to our manufacturing team.” Every single time, without fail, I get the exact same response, “I haven’t paid. I will get a payment sent over to you asap.” If you do not pay for your items, we are not going to send them to you. You do not go into a supermarket, take an item off the shelf, consume it and then try to pay for it, would you?

This is a real pet peeve of mine, our company phone greeting is, “Good morning/afternoon Sagittarius,” and I absolutely hate it when the customer or client responds, “Hello Sagittarius.” Sagittarius is not my name, nor are you being amusing. Remember, you are phoning to ask me to do something for you; if you annoy me, I am less likely to work on your request straight away and could even put you to the bottom of my list.

This next one confused my brain and resulted in a phone conversation lasting over ten minutes, and when I put the phone down, everyone in the office said, “Oh my God, that sounded so painful.” I had someone phone me, who was ordering on our website. He had put all of the items in his basket and was about to checkout, when he realised that he did not know how to checkout. I made sure that I could see the same screen that he could see and I talked him through the instructions, but he just kept saying over and over that he did not know how to checkout. Our website works in exactly the same way to any other website you use to purchase goods. You add things to the basket, click on the basket, put in your debit/credit card details and ta-dah, your order is complete. “It’s just like Amazon,” I told him, fairly certain that most people are at least familiar with what Amazon is, even if they have never purchased anything from them. “But I need an invoice to pay,” he said eventually. I do not know how I did not let out an exasperated sigh.  In the company that I work for, you can place an order in two ways. Version one: you can place your order on our website, by yourself, where you will have done all of the administration work yourself and you pay by debit/credit card. Version two: you can email or phone me and explain roughly what you are looking for and I will do all of the administration work for you, then when you are ready to pay, I will send you over a Pro Forma Invoice (which includes the administration cost) and you can pay by BACS or we can take your payment over the phone. I explained to him that if he wanted me to do all of the administration work my end, and I send him a Pro Forma Invoice, I could, but it would cost more, because I would have to charge him for the administration time. He did not want that, saying, “But I’ve done it all myself.” So, I explained to him, in a very calm manner, “Then you can pay by card on our website. I have checked your order for you several times, and you do have all of the recommended components. I can forward you a VAT Invoice after you have paid,” even though he would already receive his VAT Invoice, from his email confirmation. “No,” he huffed and puffed at me. “I need an invoice before I can pay. I’ve ordered from you before. How have I done it before then?” By now, we had already been on the phone ten minutes. If he had placed an order before, how could he suddenly not remember how to do it? I researched his previous orders. There were five, and every single one of them was placed on our website, by him. When I explained this to him, his response was, “Why can’t I do it now then?” How on earth do I know? Everyone in my office said they would have screamed at him. He eventually decided that he would ask his accountant what to do and went away. He never did place his order. That was three weeks ago.

I really do not understand when a customer, emails me, asking for me to phone them, when all of the information they require is visual. I know that they will need the images, so instead of phoning them, I email them and include all of the images and guides that I know they will require and let them know all of the information that I will need from them, before I can form a quotation for them. I say to email me if they have any questions and I leave them with my direct dial. Moments later, I receive another email saying, “Please call me.” So, I call them. Every single question they have, I have answered in my email and I have to tell them to refer to the visuals that are in my email, in order for them to understand any of the questions that they have. The entire phone conversation is absolutely pointless. I have dyslexia and even I read peoples emails before responding to them. Please read my emails before phoning me. You are wasting both my time and your time.

Quotations take time, especially if you have requested many items or something of a large size. Please do not call up to give me your request over the phone, then phone back or email me in ten minutes time, demanding to know where your quotation is. I can ensure you that I am working on it. I am sorry that some quotations are often not possible to make in under ten minutes. Chasing me, when I am working on your quotation, is just going to frustrate me and depending how rude and/or horrible you are, may influence whether I move onto a different task before completing and emailing you your quotation.

Please do not be rude, disrespectful or mean when communicating with someone in an online chat. I am trying to help you. I am sorry if I keep you waiting, but it does take time to look into your enquiry and type an answer back to you. If I do not reply to you in seconds, insulting me and threatening to report me is not going to make me magically be able to find the answer for you any sooner or help me type my response any faster. Also, selecting the thumbs down emoji option, when rating your experience on the chat is really not helpful either, especially when I have given you all of the correct information, but you just did not like that I was right, and you were wrong. All the company director will see is the thumbs down emoji. He will not be sent the conversation. He will assume that I was rude to you or told you to get lost and I will have to have to have a meeting/performance review with him.

In connection to my previous point, if I have been able to help you, in the online chat, please do not ignore selecting the thumbs up emoji option, when it asks you to rate the chat. I help hundreds of people every month, yet I have only ever received two thumbs up emojis, the whole nine months I have been here. The director believes that I have only ever helped to solve two customers problems. If you do not click the thumbs up emoji, it basically means that your query remained unsolved. If you find the online chat useful, it will be taken away if you do not leave a thumbs up, as the company thinks that it is not helpful to customers.

I am not an accountant, but I do understand how VAT invoices work, it is a shame that some of my customers do not understand this too. Our accounts team do not issue a VAT invoice until after the customer’s order has been despatched and are only forwarded to the necessary customers – those with a credit account. I had a customer phone me up, in a panic, saying that the bank was going to close his company’s bank account if I did not forward him the VAT invoice for his order, that had not been manufactured yet, but he paid by BACS. I checked with our accounts team, who said that this was a load of rubbish, yet I could not get rid of him. In the end, we had to fake an invoice and email it to him.

This is not just a rule for telephoning sales administrators, please do not phone anyone anywhere and bark the name of the person that you want to speak to, the second the receiver is lifted. It is incredibly rude and very unprofessional. Our team are not going to respect you or mark your order as a high priority, if you are unable to use your manners and be respectful. There have been several times, where I have answered the phone only to have a staff member’s name barked at me. When I asked the caller what it was regarding, they just barked the staff members name again. People who speak to me like this go on my red list. I have noted their phone numbers and when they ring, I will purposely leave it ringing as long as possible, before answering it and I will leave you on hold for ages before even trying to transfer you. We have nicknames for these sort of horrible, rude people too and we come up with all sorts of stories and scenarios as to why you are such a rude, ignorant grump.

Please do not assume that I do not know how to do my job, know nothing about manufacturing or fitting cubicle tracks, just because I am female. I know how our products are manufactured and I know how to fit them. I can talk you through how to fit them, over the phone. I could fit it for you, with my eyes closed. I am not incapable, just because I am female.

Please follow my instructions and provide me with your measurements using the Metric system, not in feet and inches. I have asked for the measurement to be in Metrics for a reason. Converting measurements from feet and inches into millimetres using an online converter might not make your measurements accurate. If we make your track a few millimetres too short, due to conversion rounding, your track will not fit. Also, England has been using the Metric system since 1965 and is the standard measurement used in the UK trading industry. Therefore, for the past 57 years, UK businesses have been using Metric measurements. I am in my thirties and have only been brought up to use the Metric system. I am sorry, but I do not know how to convert 45’-6⅞” into decimal places, in order to convert it into millimetres, even if I wanted to convert the measurements. I have specifically instructed you to measure in metres, centimetres or millimetres for a reason. Ignoring my request will only delay your quotation being created for you.

If you send me over a floor plan that is not to scale and contains no measurement references, for a guide to work on, I can only make estimated measurements based on the width of your doorway (and even then door widths are not all a standard size). As these are estimates, when I send the measurements over to you for confirmation, please do not agree to them, to avoid doing any work yourself, because when you ask us to manufacture them, you are the only one to blame when none of the tracks fit. You can complain, scream at me down the phone and send as many angry emails as you like, but it is not my fault. I cannot stress this enough, if you do not give me a to-scale plan or any measurements to work from, I do not magically know the sizes of your room. You might as well have got a small child to draw a picture of the room, because that would be just as useful to me as a not scaled drawing.

Please do not phone me up to scream at me, claiming that your order was manufactured wrong, when you requested a left-bend track, so we made you a left bend track. It is not my fault that you do not know your left from your right. I have sent you a guide, getting you to confirm which of the below drawings, matches the track that you want. It is your fault for saying that you have checked my drawing, when you have never opened the jpg. 

 

Trigonometry is important. It exists for a reason. It is taught in school for a reason. The particular angle of a triangle must be a specific degree in order to calculate the longest side. You cannot give me the lengths of the three sides of a triangle and say that you want them that length just because you want those measurements, without using trigonometry to see if the lengths are realistic. I had a customer demand that his track be made to a specific length, but it had an unusual angle, because it needed to bend around a sink/basin. The length that he demanded this specific part of his cubicle track to be was impossible, based on the angle that we needed to manufacture the bend at. I literally had to send him a link to an online trigonometry calculator to try and explain it to him and he still did not get it. I do not know whether he was refusing to listen to me, because I was female, or whether it was because he was an engineer and I was only an administrator.

Phoning up, not just the company that I work for, but any company, and speaking none stop, without letting me get a word in edge wise is not the smartest thing to do. If you had let me speak, I would have been able to tell you that you do not need to explain everything to me, as I need to know who you need to speak to or what department you are looking to speak with, then I can transfer you. You will only get annoyed that you have explained everything to me and then you have to repeat it all to the person I transfer you to. I am the receptionist, as well as the administrator, in my work place. A simple, “Hi, my name is Tracey. I’m looking to speak to someone regarding a commercial measure for some blinds,” is all I need to hear. Keep it simple and to the point, then when you are through to the right department, be it myself or a colleague, then you can explain all that you require.

If I am on the phone, when you try to call, your call will go straight through to voicemail. You do not have to leave a message. You can choose to email me or phone back again later. However, I would advise against leaving the following voicemail message, “You’re f**ing useless,” just because I am answering another phone call. Do you really want me to return the call after you have left that message? Do you realise that I still have to look after your order? I am not going to do you any favours after language like that. I am also going to report you to the company director and every time you call from now on, your conversation is recorded and emailed direct to him (all calls do state, by an automated voice, that calls are recorded for training and monitoring purposes before you are connected to me). I am sorry that I cannot speak to two people at the same time. I am sorry that this makes me rubbish to you. We do not need your business if you are going to be rude and our director would rather you take your business elsewhere.

It really frustrates me when customers/clients refuse to accept our company’s pronunciation of a product that we created and always insist on correct me. The company director created a product where part of it is pronounced clen-ee (as in ‘clen’ that rhymes with ‘when’ and ‘ee’ that rhymes with ‘me’) but there are so many customers that say, “No,” and try to correct me and pronounce it incorrect, as clean-ee (as in the word ‘clean’ that rhymes with ‘mean’ and ‘ee’ that rhymes with ‘me’). I am working for the company that created the product. Do you really think that the creator of the product is the one that has been pronouncing it wrong all this time?

You are not the only customer of the company that I work for. We may be the only external company that you are currently dealing with, but that does not mean that we are sitting around twiddling our thumbs between talking to you. Phoning up to say that you emailed a colleague ten minutes ago and complain that you have not heard back yet is not going to get your email answered any quicker. Also, I cannot transfer your call to them if they are in a meeting, because they will be away from their desk phone. Why? Because we have other clients and customers to deal with. You are not our only customer. We will see to your enquiry as soon as we are able, please be patient.

Never assume that you are such an important company that we will drop everything that we are doing to kiss your feet. There is a woman, who phones the office up once a year, to place a £50 order and she thinks that her one, single order a year means that we have to give her discounts and beg her to come back. She demanded to speak to my manager, when I told her that we didn’t have a discount code at the moment and she said to me, “I give you a lot of business every year,” as though I was supposed to be impressed with this. Her order was for £50. Most of my customer’s order are 10% more than that and lately, I’ve got the company three £10k orders. Our sales managers get £50k, sometimes £100k jobs. Yes, it is good to have lots of customers, but please do not be so arrogant as to think that if it wasn’t for your one order a year that our company would go into administration.

This last one is a rare one, but it still happens occasionally, so it obviously needs to be said to people: when giving me your long, sixteen digit number on the front of your debit/credit card (when making a payment over the phone) please do not read me all sixteen numbers as fast as the speed of light, as though you are in a race with Usain Bolt. I cannot type the numbers that fast into the card machine – which is the same, small device that you see in all shops now a days. If you genuinely do not know the correct way to communicate this to me, people read me four numbers at a time and pause at the space. I then type the four numbers in and say, “Yes,” once I have typed the numbers, to signal you to read me the next four. Reading that long number as fast as possible is not amusing and it is wasting your time and my time, because I am going to have to ask you to read it out to me again, but slowly.

 

- Josie -

 

Death Threat

(Josie Sayz: This is a piece that I wrote for a ‘Life Writing’ module at university. Apart from my lecturer, I have only shared this with one other person before. This is a true story.)

Death Threat

“You’re paranoid.” Maddison and Kirsten laughed, while Abigail gave me another lecture. “No one’s at the window, we’re on the second floor.” I glared at them. They were always making fun of my constant worrying. That someone, anyone was lurking… watching… waiting to get me. So what if I was worried? They’d be sorry when something happened, and they weren’t prepared.

Shrugging off their laughter, I made my way up the next flight of stairs to my IT classroom. Swinging the classroom door open, I expected to be met by the warm smile of Ms. Sadler, but instead Miss Smith took her place. Forcing a smile in her direction, I took my seat at my computer – one row from the back. Our regular teacher Mr. Kilbride was teaching at the connecting school in Gloucester. He had been teaching there on a Thursday afternoon all half term, so we had been having cover teachers. Usually we had Ms. Sadler, but today it was Miss Smith.

As my computer powered up, I took out my IT instruction booklet and flicked it open to my next assignment: Assignment Five. While my dinosaur of a computer loaded its user settings, I glanced across the room at the rest of my class. They were only on Assignment Two, they wasted all of their time playing games and browsing the internet. Not wanting anyone to know that I was ahead of them on the assignments, I kept a low profile.

After Miss Smith took the register, a hand hit me on the shoulder. I turned around. “What assignment are you on?” whispered Ellie, who sat behind me.

“Three,” I replied.

“Will you send me what you did for the first two?” she asked. “I won’t copy.”

“No,” I told her, turning back around. I knew that coping was exactly what she was going to do.

“Caitlin,” she whispered. Miss Smith glanced up at us from her computer. I lowered my head and began typing. “Caitlin,” Ellie hissed. Again, I ignored her. “Caitlin!” BANG! Something thumped me on the head.

“Ooh!” Simon shouted out. “Did you see that?” Gripping my head tight I clasped my eyes shut. No I did not see that.

“What?” Niall asked.

“She just hit Caitlin over the head.”

People started whispering. Slouching in my chair, I felt my face heat up, embarrassed by the room’s conversation topic. It’s strange, my head hardly hurt until people took interest in it… now it throbbed. Noticing the commotion, Miss. Smith came over to me. Kneeling to my height, she asked, “Are you alright?” With a hand gripped upon my head I nodded. As she returned to her desk, Ellie hissed, “Send me the work,” yanking one of my pigtails.

“Ouch!” Jack gasped, sensing my pain.

“She’s terrorising her,” Niall laughed. I pulled my pigtails around my neck and rubbed my head. Ignoring everyone, I continued my assignment.

“Caitlin, are you okay?” Simon asked. I nodded. He didn’t really care; he just wanted to make sure that he was a part of the game being played – with me as the bait. THUMP! Something hit my head again.

Everyone burst out laughing. I knew they were laughing at me. They had to be laughing at me. What else was there to laugh at? My vision clouded as liquid filtered into my eyes. I blinked repeatedly, to ensure that I did not cry. “Ellie fell off her chair!” I heard someone shout. The laughter continued.

“She’s drunk!” someone added.

My thoughts exploded. The pounding spiralled ideas, notions around in a circumbendibus. I had to shut myself off from everyone. Their voices loudened. Their laughter loudened. Computers hummed. Fingers typed. Trap pads clicked. My heart drummed fiercely, above the room’s ruckus. My ears thudded. Voices grew louder. The drumming grew louder. My chest expanded. Contracted. Expanded. Contracted. Expanded. Contracted.

*

I stood outside the classroom, leaning against the wall, with Miss Smith beside me. “What’s going on?” she asked. How did I get here? I didn’t remember leaving my chair. My cheeks were wet. I’d been crying. Sniffing I shrugged. I didn’t know. How was I supposed to know what was going on? I just kept being hit over the head.

“Someone hit me over the head,” I heard myself say.

“Who?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know.” To be honest, I didn’t. There were five people sat behind me, any of them could have been the culprit. I wouldn’t put it past Lewis – he would probably do it for no other reason than amusement and to get attention for hitting someone with ginger hair.

The classroom door swung open. Ellie flew out, threw herself by my side, hugging my arm. “Go back inside,” Miss Smith ordered.

“But I’m worried about Caitlin, Miss. She’s crying and someone keeps hitting her over the head.” Leaving us outside, Miss Smith returned to the classroom. Once she had disappeared Ellie gripped my arm. “If you tell anyone it was me, I’ll kill you…” she sneered daggering her nails into my arm. “I’ll kill you Caitlin. I’ll be waiting for you after school. I’ll come after you.” Staring into her eyes, I swallowed hard. “I’m serious… you’re dead.”

Back inside the classroom, Miss Smith returned her attention to her laptop. I held my assignment guide up to my face and began typing. Typing what? Letters. Words. Phrases. Anything. Nothing. The sentences made no sense. My head made no sense. “Ellie, stop harassing Caitlin,” Simon warned her. Turning my head slightly, I saw her return the computer keyboard to the desk.

“I haven’t done nothing!” she protested.

“Well then why were you holding the keyboard over her head?” asked Lewis. Miss Smith glanced up from her screen.

“I wasn’t!” Ellie whaled.

“We all saw you.” Miss Smith rose from her chair, looking in our direction.

“I’ll kill you,” Ellie whispered into my ear, her breath contaminating my neck. As I turned to face her, she staggered past my desk to the classroom door, flung it open and sped off down the corridor.

*

Again, I found myself outside of the classroom. Miss Smith made me explain to her everything. Between bursts of hyperventilation, I managed to retell what I thought had happened. As I finished, she ran back into the classroom to retrieve a packet of tissues, piece of paper and pen. After scrawling a message onto a piece of paper, she handed it to me. “Mr. Llewellyn’s on lunch duty in the Hall. I want you to go and give this note to him, which explains everything that you’ve just told me.” My hand hesitated, refusing to grip the paper. “It’s okay,” she said. “You aren’t telling Mr. Llewellyn, I am.”

With the note clasped tightly in my hands, I crept down the IT staircase. As I reached the bottom, I checked to make sure that every direction was clear, before continuing. As I turned down the corridor towards the Hall, my heart’s loud drumming returned. Holding my fist against my rib cage, I held it securely in place.

I could see people. There were people in the Hall. What if she was there? If she was, she’d know that I had told someone. She’d know that I had told someone and that they had made me go to see the Deputy Head teacher and then she would kill me. My feet stopped. I stared at them, but they wouldn’t move. What was wrong with them?

Looking up at the Hall’s entrance, I saw a familiar face – my best friend, James. As he walked in my direction, my body began to relax slightly. “Are you alright?” he asked, placing a hand upon my arm. My eyes shifted from his, down to the piece of paper in my hand and back to him again. I could feel my bottom lip quivering. If there was one person I could tell, then it was him. We had known each other forever.

“Hey James!” a voice shouted. Flinching, I clasped James’ hand and turned to face where the voice had come from. It was Craig. Jerking his head in the direction that I had just come from, he asked, “You comin’ playground?”

“Yeah,” he replied, ignoring me. Leaving me. Before I could even find my voice, he was gone. I was alone.

*

Entering the Hall, everyone turned to me. They knew. They had to know. They all knew that I told Miss Smith, that I thought about telling James and that I was on my way to tell Mr. Llewellyn and this was going to be the last time they’d see me alive, because I was going to die.

Having made my way through the mass of bodies to the front of the Hall, I handed Mr. Llewellyn the piece of paper. I stared at him as he read it. His eyes widened. The bushes above them rose. His brow creased. Lowering the note, he searched the room for another teacher. “Wait here,” he told me. Clambering off the stage, he caught the arm of another teacher, commanding them to take over lunch duty. Without speaking, he led me out of the Hall and into his office, leaning against his walking stick.

“Do you know where this girl went?” he asked me, handing me his box of tissues. I shook my head. A search party was sent out. Teachers searched the school, some outside. Sitting at Mr. Llewellyn’s desk I watched several cars pull out of the car park. The door was locked. I was alone.

*

Swaying from left to right on Mr. Llewellyn’s spinning chair, I twirled the tissue box around. The box’s pink flowers were too feminine for him. Maybe the box was our Head teacher’s instead. They were quite a nice pink, dark, and not too girly. Maybe they were the sort of flowers that people would bring to my funeral. Would anyone turn up to my funeral? Maddison, Abigail and Kirsten would, wouldn’t they? And James. James would be there. What about Mr. Llewellyn? He would have to; he’s the Deputy Head teacher. I wonder what they’ll say… “Caitlin, she was a quiet girl, a good girl… too bad for her that it cost her her life.” If I hadn’t cared about Ellie copying my work, then maybe I wouldn’t have died. But wait a minute… I’m not dead yet.

I checked my watch. Three minutes had passed since I last checked it. I thought of making a will. Who would I leave what to? Maddison always wanted my spotty umbrella; she could have it. And I could leave Abigail my pencil case – it would match her bag. I searched for a pen and some paper.

I checked my watch. Two minutes had passed since I last checked it. I’d been in Mr. Llewellyn’s office for almost two hours. Had they found Ellie? Had she threatened to kill me? Had she killed them? She must have done, that’s why no one had been back for me. Ellie had gone mad and killed all of them. She killed everyone.

There was a knock on the door. I flinched. “Caitlin…” a voice croaked, before opening the door. Mr. Llewellyn’s head appeared in the doorway. “We’ve found her.” He perched himself on the edge of his desk and explained to me the events that had taken place during my incarceration. Two teachers had found Ellie hiding in a bush, outside my house. She knew they were looking for her. They had brought her back and she was sitting in the interview room. She had not meant to threaten me, Mr. Llewellyn explained. She was not herself – had been pressured by friends into drinking alcohol. “She wants to apologise,” he told me. But before I saw her, he wanted to make it clear to me first that she would not harm me.

He brought her in. She was crying. “I’m sorry Caitlin,” she bawled. “I never meant it. I’m sorry.” She wasn’t sorry. She was sorry that she got caught, but not for what she said.

“Ellie’s a good girl,” Mr. Llewellyn explained after she was gone. “She’s not going to hurt you, so don’t you worry.” I stared at him nodding. “It was the alcohol.” Again, I nodded. He escorted me back to lesson.

It’s funny. The next time I thought I saw a shadowing figure through the window, Abigail, Maddison and Kirsten thought twice about laughing. It shows that I was right all along. Even now, I double check the locks on doors and windows before I leave, I never walk home the same way two days running and I’ll always walk the wrong way if there is someone behind me. Just in case.

- Josie -