In mid-December 2004, I was hired as "technical support" by a company that managed call centers nationwide for a major firm in the Telecom industry. Three weeks later, utterly demoralized, I quit.

One major reason was the latest trends in call centers: cross-training tech for sales. Not only was I required to assist people who were having trouble with the web browsers on their phones, I had to "maximize" or "upsell" as well, or risk termination. I wasn't told this, of course, when I was hired. It gradually came up during training.

During the first few days we were told, "Your training will be half tech, and half customer service. We'll start with customer service." A few days later, we heard, "Of your eight weeks of training, we'll spend six on customer service and two on technical."

By the third week, the word was, "You'll spend three days with someone who's in tech to show you the ropes" before going live with customers. Won't it be hard to help people with their problems, I wondered? And shouldn't solving those technical problems be of primary importance? After all, the company I was to represent scored "significantly worse than average" for customer satisfaction in PC Magazine's 2004 Reader Satisfaction Survey. During my tenure, another survey was released that ranked customer service representatives at cellular companies just above the perennial bottom-dwelling used car salesperson.

So just what were they teaching us?

People hate to be lied to, we were told, and they hate to feel that they are being taken advantage of. We were being taught to establish a relationship with the customer in order to... well, in order to help them buy our services. It was all couched in very nurturing language. We spent hours being recorded reading various scenarios and our sincerity judged by our trainers. As soon as we were judged "sincere enough," we were moved on to "devising testimonials." Instead of actually studying about the services and products we were going to be selling and servicing, we were instructed to break up into groups and "hone our testimonial skills" on each other by composing three stories, two true and one less-than-true, and attempting to "make them all sound the same."

It was a fascinating exercise, especially since we didn't have to use cell phone-related stories. Some people did, of course, which I thought was at least in the spirit of the assignment; trying to make people believe that the tires on your car have lasted twelve years is all well and good but, I didn't see how it was helping me sell long distance plans. (Which wasn't what I wanted to become a technical support rep to do in the first place.) At the end of the day, we could vote on our favorite testimonial and the winner received an extra break the following shift.

The winner, it turned out, had told a story so bizarre you couldn't make it up, and we were astounded when we discovered its veracity. The trainer nodded sagely and told us that truth is often stranger than fiction. This was fascinating, but it didn't explain why we weren't strictly focusing on the testimonials that were more true. Or why we weren't spending those eight hours learning how to use the new Maximizer software that had just been installed—which of course we were expected to master so we could do all that upselling.

The reasoning behind this particular exercise, we were told, was to offer the customer validation about what we were trying to sell them. "That's a great plan for someone who makes as few long distance calls as you do!" just wouldn't cut it anymore; people needed to feel that we could relate to the problems they were having with their cellular service. Unless their problem was "Why can't you just help me without trying to sell me something?" Or, "I've been waiting for ten minutes to speak to a real person and now all you want me to do is buy more minutes?" For pesky little questions such as those, all the testimonials in the world weren't going to help. Only product and service knowledge can save you now. And that's what seemed to be getting lost in the shuffle.

People don't tend to call tech support to make friends; they call to get answers to questions. I don't care if the CSR at my cell phone provider orders pizzas on her phone just like I do; what I do care about is that she, or someone she can connect me to, knows the ins and outs of my service plan and whether my Nokia has digital or analog roaming. As a customer, I don't think that's too much to ask.

And it shouldn't be too much to ask that CSRs be trained to answer the questions that matter to the consumer, instead of learning to spin a good yarn. Call me idealistic, but I'm still of a mind that training should benefit both customer and employee. I don't feel I'm doing anyone much good telling them tales of my personal cellular derring-do instead of explaining how to use their voice mail.

Jill Rossetto is a freelance writer.

None of the companies mentioned in this article have been clients of CRMuse LLC for at least the past six months. Jill Rossetto, of course, worked for the unnamed telecom support organization within the past six months.