Kenya Neely

I attribute my success to basically just life. When you get older, your perspective on things change. Now that I'm getting a lot older, I look at everything in life as an experience now, and I look at every day now as a learning experience. When you're young, you're carefree, you don't think about your future or life in a broad spectrum. So now I don't take nothing for granted, and even with my job, I have to just keep reminding myself that I'm here to do a job, and my job is to render great customer service, no matter how I feel personally, no matter how the person on the other end feels. I just have to try to stay positive and upbeat. Even if you're going through a storm, the person on the phone don't need to know you're going through a storm. At the end of the day, you just have to look at life for what it is, because life is short and nobody ever played right on that. You don't know when your ticket is gonna be called.

The best career advice I ever received came from one of my best female friends. She told me when I get up in the morning, pray over my day and pray throughout my day. She was like, just smile, you know, even though they can't see you smiling on the phone, it can be projected through your voice and your attitude. And she was like, just, when they're angry, smile. Kill them with kindness.

I would give anybody that's entering into the customer service field my advice to put yourself in the caller's shoes. How would you feel? And go from there. That's how you learn to have empathy. Put yourself in their position, think about how they're feeling, having to take time off from something else that they could be doing that's really important, but they have to take the time to call you and fussed about something, a product that they wasn't expecting to go wrong. They thought it was a good product, they trusted in the company. Now, here it is on recall, so yes, they're gonna be a little attitudinish with it. They're gonna voice their opinion, so just put yourself in their shoes and say, hey, if that was me, would I be upset? And you have to just sit back and let them go.

Right now, I would say the most challenging thing is dealing with angry customers and having a supervisor that don't really listen to you. That can be a challenge when you're trying to voice your opinion. Also, some things you may not agree with how the company wants you to do things and handle certain situations. Like, they have this on-hold policy where you have to check back every 90 seconds with the customer, and I don't agree with that. If I have to check back every 90 seconds while I'm doing an escalation form for them, that's gonna take me even longer to complete the form. I feel like they should at least give us at least 2 minutes, every 2 minutes, check back in. And if you're checking in every 90 seconds, they may become irritated with that. They're gonna probably feel like, well, you can check in me back-to-back, what are you doing? Are you working on my situation? But they don't see it that way. You want to try to tell them that they're wrong, and they think they're right.

The values that I hold dear to me in my work and personal life are basically respect, empathy, love, and attention. If you don't pay attention to what you're doing in life, and you don't pay attention to people around you, you never know what may happen. I tell my grandbabies, who I call my kids because they are my kids even though mine are grown, to pay attention to your surroundings and pay attention to the people around you. That's very important in life because you may see a lesson right there that you don't even know about. You don't know what God is gonna put in front of you to teach you a lesson. I tell them all the time, pay attention to life, make sure you love each other. I don't care if you're mad at your sister, your cousin, whatever, you better love them at the end of the day. Never, ever stay angry. I tell them to be empathetic because you don't know what the next person may be going through. If you could be a blessing to that person, be a blessing. Don't expect nothing in return. It doesn't have to always be, well, I did this for you, what you gonna do for me? Let God handle your blessings. He's the one that give them. If you bless the next person, a month from now, a week from now, God might have a blessing waiting right there for you. And be nice, don't be a bully.