“OMP support. Good morning, Danielle speaking.”

Silence.

We never know for sure who’s calling us, but we do love to guess. Back when COVID-19 was just another excellent random password, my colleague and I used to bet on it. Just to give each other that old school sassy ‘told you so’ look when we were proved right.

Magic recipe

You’re probably wondering how on earth we could have any idea who’s calling. We base our guesses on three main ingredients. First, there’s the international calling code. But we have customers in a lot of countries, and it’s impossible to know all the codes by heart.

Then there are our common callers as we like to call this group of customers. These are callers flagged as key users of the OMP solution and are therefore our first point of contact for a given customer. They all share a certain love of calling — what else did you expect? And finally, there’s our ticket portal and incoming e-mails to give us an indication of current issues.

Surprised, but in a different way

Sadly, there are no speculation games these days. We’ve tried to play the game remotely via Skype or MS Teams, but it’s simply not the same. There is no joy in winning the speculation game since the old school ‘told you so’ isn’t a part of it. But that doesn’t mean there are no more surprises.

With so many people working from home, we can really be surprised: a barking dog on the other end of the line instead of a human being. That lady unable to answer a call back (“I’m sorry, the kids ran off with the phone” she admits ten minutes later).

Just a time-out

It’s the unexpected that helps me cope during this extraordinary period. We enjoy the small talk with customers about the lockdown situation and this really makes my day. A big thanks is due to all of you for that, and to my colleagues in Customer Services.

Hopefully, in a few months we’ll all look back on this lockdown period as a simple time-out. As soon as we’re back at the office, the speculation game is on. You can bet on it!

Want to join our speculation game? Check out our Application Support Analyst vacancy!