I’m a “Customer Service Rep” at a Big Tech Company

2014, as I was nearing graduation, I interned as a product‑operations associate in the airline ticket division of an OTA company.

Calling it “product operations” was a fancy way of saying we were basically customer‑service reps taking calls. The company was experimenting with a new model that mimicked the operations of ticket agencies, and most of the daily work involved fielding calls and handling user issues. So a handful of us soon‑to‑graduate interns became “customer service agents.”

Although I had never worked before, I already knew that customer service was hard work. How hard it actually was, I only discovered after living it. Fortunately the daily call volume wasn’t huge, so the main difficulty was the schedule.

I’m not sure how many of you know what a typical customer‑service schedule looks like. In most places it’s shift‑based. In our case the hotline ran from 8 a.m. to midnight, so we split the day into two shifts: 8 a.m.–4 p.m. and 4 p.m.–12 a.m., with rotating days off so that each person got two days off per week, not necessarily on the weekend. Honestly, this roster was already far more humane than most call‑center jobs: eight‑hour days, five workdays with two days off, no graveyard shift (12 a.m.–8 a.m.). Yet the irregular rhythm still felt disorienting and chaotic.

Another pain point was the back‑to‑back shift switching. For example, after working the 4 p.m.–12 a.m. shift one week, you might be assigned the 8 a.m.–4 p.m. shift the next week. On the transition day you’d finish at midnight and be back on the clock at 8 a.m. the same morning—a fatigue that usually took a couple of days to subside, only to be jolted again by the next schedule change.

These erratic hours threw my whole life out of sync, testing my physical stamina and adaptability. The hidden exhaustion and pressure are easy to overlook; you really only understand them after you’ve lived through them.

A further invisible drain was the constant “on‑call” tension. Even though call volume was modest, management demanded a 90 %+ answer rate. During lunch or even a bathroom break, I had to forward the office line to my mobile and stare at the screen, fearing I’d miss a call. My body and mind were perpetually primed for battle, which is draining.

Luckily my actual duties were relatively light. Most callers were users of the agency who wanted to cancel or change tickets. They asked about fees, procedures, refund timing, or requested that we handle the change for them. A smaller portion of calls were informational: “Can someone with heart disease or high blood pressure fly? Is there an age limit (can a 60‑year‑old fly)? Will a baby have any issues on a plane? How do I buy a child ticket?” and so on.

Rainy days were my worst nightmare: call volume would explode, sometimes many times the normal level. Bad weather caused massive flight cancellations, and the surge of cancellation‑and‑re‑booking inquiries came with angry callers demanding explanations, compensation, and blaming us for the disruption. All we could say was, “I’m sorry, sir/ma’am, the weather made travel impossible; we apologize for the inconvenience.” Holiday peaks like May 1 and National Day were similarly stressful.

Despite the headaches, working as a user‑support agent was overall a happy experience for me. I knew the job was temporary, and many callers would thank me sincerely. Their gratitude felt genuine, and I was glad to have actually helped them.

One memory that still stays with me is an elderly couple whose son lived elsewhere. They were flying for the first time and were terrified. Their son was too busy to help, so they called us for guidance. I’d only flown once myself, so I likened the process to taking a train: I explained how to pick up the ticket, pass security, and find the gate. At the end of the call, the grandmother said, “Thank you, little girl.” I can still picture the scene: the two seniors huddled around a phone, the grandmother speaking, the grandfather with his reading glasses taking notes. Their loneliness, helplessness, and the heartfelt “thank you” have never left me.

Three months later the project ended, and our intern cohort finished our stint in user support.

After graduation I stayed on at the same company (don’t ask, there weren’t better options). My first role was user operations and data analysis. After a re‑organization, I entered a second round of customer‑service work, this time under the nicer‑sounding title of “merchant operations.”

Merchant operations finally gave me a normal schedule—no rotating shifts—but it wasn’t easy either. Hours were 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., with no lunch break.

The workflow went like this: when an agency had a question or issue, we asked them to submit a ticket in the system, promising to resolve it the same day. Of course, agencies didn’t trust that a ticket would be cleared that day, nor that it would be handled without a phone call, and they preferred their problems to be prioritized. So the typical pattern was: they submit a ticket, then immediately call in, crying, “Why haven’t you dealt with it yet? I submitted it ages ago!” Often the ticket had just been opened a few seconds earlier. (Turns out I’d already experienced the “inner competition” culture early on 😂.) The people answering the phones were in a terrible spot: you couldn’t ignore a call, and once you picked up you couldn’t hang up, while still needing to close all tickets by day’s end. We became masters of multitasking—taking calls while typing replies to tickets—from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., ten hours a day.

Busy days were the norm and manageable, but the worst moments were system outages and bugs. Airline ticketing is a transaction business; any glitch either hurts the agency’s earnings or makes them lose money (the platform eventually covers it). When an outage occurred, the phones would ring off the hook, and sometimes the entire team had to answer. I remember two vivid scenes: one time, while the team was on a field trip to Gubei Water Town, a bug struck just as we boarded the bus. We spent the whole ride taking calls; by the time we arrived, the issue was resolved, and the sudden silence was oddly unsettling (silence is good, but the abrupt quiet felt weird 🤣). Another time, during the department’s year‑end party, we still had to staff a phone line. A minor bug popped up, and a few of us were stuck at the back of the banquet hall, listening to colleagues chatting, snacking, and watching performances on stage—none of which had anything to do with us. I barely even know what the performance was now; looking back it feels bittersweet.

In truth, the hardest part wasn’t the workload or the chaos; it was the merchants’ terrible attitudes. Unlike ordinary users, who are generally reasonable and polite (with only a few rude exceptions), most merchants were abrasive from the start, launching into insults before any explanation. A tiny minority were civil. I can understand their frustration—their backgrounds (often only middle‑school education or less) and the urgency of money‑related issues—but taking daily verbal abuse is exhausting.

Our policy was clear: we had to answer every call, never hang up, and never engage in conflict. So we often swallowed our pride, letting the caller vent for ten or twenty minutes before we could calmly ask for details and resolve the issue.

Such tirades became routine. Once, I lost my temper and shouted into the phone, “Do you even want to solve this problem or not?” My voice was so loud the office fell silent; everyone stared at me. From that moment, the team knew a new, hot‑tempered member had arrived. The merchant calmed down, became polite, and never shouted again.

Nearly a decade later I still think back on that period. Today I finally put it in writing as the first entry of my “Beijing work diary.”

I’m both proud of the resilience I showed back then and aware that the experience revealed a raw slice of reality.

I often say that respect is the most lacking virtue in our society. We love to flaunt our sense of superiority (I’m not sure “superiority” is the perfect word, but think of the mindset: “Customers are gods, so you must satisfy me; if you’re unhappy or something goes wrong, I’m entitled to hurl abuse at you”). Yet, from a higher perspective, we’re all just people—no one is inherently higher than anyone else.

The wheel of fortune turns; someday those who flaunt superiority will find themselves trampled by others.

2023‑09‑08
Beijing

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Originally written by Estela Young and published in Chinese on 一只产品汪的自白. Translated and edited for DriftSeas with permission.