Reach out Answer the phone and touch someone
The December call stats are in at work and I ended up very near the top of the list for number of calls taken during the month, despite missing two days of work due to illness. I don't really understand the significance of this statistic, but apparently it's an indication that I'm doing a good job because my supervisor was very pleased. Anyway, the stats show that I took 1146 calls during the month of December. The folks at work say it's very rare to talk to the same person more than once even when the customer has to call back multiple times, but my experience has been that I actually do get the same customer again on occasion (it's either my karma or I have a better memory than other folks.) So allowing for that, I probably still talked to at least 1000 different people in December. That's a lot of lives to touch, albeit in an insignificant way. Though, maybe it's not as insignificant as I think. Who ever knows the real effect that we have on people's lives. Maybe that bit of encouragement I gave to the newbie computer user later propelled them to a successful career as a top ebay seller. Or maybe that user that could only contact her Indonesian relatives via email found out everyone was safe after the tsunami and was able to sleep soundly that night. Perhaps I'm only drawing a paycheck here, but I'd like to think that some how, some way, I'm making a difference. It might not be significant in the grand scheme of things, but maybe a pleasant customer service experience over a lousy one counts for something.