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Confounding Factor posted:Has it been a trend that call centers slide down into what indescribably feels like a prison? I remember my call center job it was great, relaxed and alot of freedom. We were happy, until they buckled down and started taking in call center metrics from other sources like Comcast, DirecTV, DISH, etc and it became a nigthmare to work there. It turned into a prison where we couldn't have anything on our desks and had supervisors going up and down the aisles monitoring us, as if monitoring our calls wasn't enough. I think what you find is that call centre management start out clueless as to what an efficient operation looks like. They allow a lot of freedom and things are relaxed. As is always the case, people start to abuse this, and people complaining does nothing as there's no rules to stop them from doing whatever it is they're doing. Then someone goes on a training course or a seminar, and they come back having learned words like "Erlang" and "Occupancy" and "Schedule inefficiencies" and stuff. Some of the people that were loving around get caught out and have to actually work. Those who were working before wind up working harder. Some of the gently caress around crew work out ways around the new regime and continue loving around and being carried by the former two groups. Finally you enter terminal phase - someone reasons that because they went from terrible management to half decent management and got a 20% uplift in effectiveness from their staff, they should be able to just keep doing that indefinitely. Any non core time is stripped out of calendars, occupancy is pushed to as close to 100% as possible, service levels drop, staff start approaching burnout and taking sick days, team leaders/supervisors are constantly trying to browbeat their staff into achieving the insane metrics handed down from on high (usually by middle management who are padding the targets from head office to give themselves a margin for error, which unfortunately can only be achieved by working their staff like pit ponies) while dealing with their absurd sickness levels and complaints of stress related illness. Decent management can put off that last stage for a long, long time, but the middle one is pretty much guaranteed. If you're in that last one, run like gently caress and get a job doing literally anything else, because bankruptcy and redundancy is around the corner for that company.
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Sep 23, 2012 19:15
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I've only heard terrible things about TV and cellphone service call centers especially when they're outsourced to third party companies that specialize in RESULTS. I've never had anything criticized or questioned at my job except for some of my performance stats, if I didn't have to have meetings about those every other month ("You went up .2% on this stat, what can we do to maximize our time management in this area?" "  " ), this job would be easy peasy. I wear the clothes that I want, I have stupid nerd toys on my desk, I talk to my neighbors, I have a comfortable level of autonomy in decision making on calls, and when something exceeds me, I feel comfortable arguing on the customers behalf to get it done. Scheduling dumps same day absence into the scheduler every day so I can usually knock off an hour+ early if I want with no consequences other than docked pay of course. I really just need to suck it up and stop being a baby, because for the pay/benefits I have, my job could be about ten times worse.
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Sep 23, 2012 20:14
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Fil5000 posted:The Truth.,, Oh hey, you've just described my place of work. 
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Sep 24, 2012 03:47
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Confounding Factor posted:Has it been a trend that call centers slide down into what indescribably feels like a prison? I remember my call center job it was great, relaxed and alot of freedom. We were happy, until they Yep, it certainly happened in my first-party telecom call centre. It was a great job, then they slowly started taking away our ability to make judgement decisions, added new terrible metrics and generally slid downhill. But I guess it looks good on the balance sheet? 
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Sep 24, 2012 06:31
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My job has gone down the shitter as of late, but it's mostly due to technology and partial outsourcing. We upgraded from hard phones to softphones this year. At the same time, our calls started getting visually-monitored in realtime (as opposed to the old audio recordings, no video or even screencaps). Before, nobody could tell if we were surfing the internet when a caller put us on hold. It didn't matter as long as it didn't affect the sound of the call. But now if you alt tab during a call and it gets QA'd, you get docked. Even if you're on hold for like 5 minutes (which happened to me twice last week). gently caress that poo poo, I'm not sitting there for 5 minutes twiddling my thumbs. I'd have blown my brains out 3 years ago if that was a requirement. And with the new tech came a hard-on for cross-training (which has got to be businesspeak for "training that makes you cross"). The more lines of business each rep learns how to handle, the fewer employees are needed, and the higher our occupancy becomes. It's great because we're more flexible! loving hooray. Our center hours were also pushed back, due to midday hold times and lack of calls in the evening (they shoved those off onto our 24-hour office in another state). And because all the paper claims we used to handle have since been outsourced. So now, we close at 8pm instead of midnight. We lost a good amount of staff when the hours changed. When I started this job, there was plenty of downtime between nearly every call, every day. It was vanishingly rare to have anyone on hold. We always have calls on hold now, and no downtime. None. People are starting to camp out in ACW for multiple minutes after every call they take. But I'm sure it's only a matter of time before they start live-monitoring that, too.
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Sep 24, 2012 07:45
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With my forecasting/capacity planning head on, there's a lot of reasons to multi skill people (providing your technology can do stuff like skill based call routing). Especially if your business has lots of low volume call groups, such that combining them gives you a really easy increase in occupancy. What you're describing seems to be the other kind of multiskilling, where someone's desperately pushing occupancy up to silly levels and the customer winds up being the one suffering.
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Sep 24, 2012 08:21
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martyrdumb posted:When I started this job, there was plenty of downtime between nearly every call, every day. It was vanishingly rare to have anyone on hold. We always have calls on hold now, and no downtime. None. People are starting to camp out in ACW for multiple minutes after every call they take. But I'm sure it's only a matter of time before they start live-monitoring that, too. All I know about that is that our call center does live monitor "outbound". I think my call center is slowly going to a hybrid Tier 1/3 system. I know when I first started, any cable TV calls were immediately sent back to Tier 1 to handle. Now we must handle all cable TV calls, and they're hiring Tier 1's who know absolutely jack poo poo about computers. They still haven't trained us on basic cable calls. We "learn as we go" and that's the only training we get. They keep changing our metrics though. We just went from 3/4 of our "corporate" metrics being poo poo that customers control (Trouble Call Rate, First Call resolution, CSAT scores) to down to one (CSAT) with the others being hold time, outbound, etc. Guess I should be glad they change metrics when nobody meets them.
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Sep 24, 2012 15:41
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It happened today, guys. I hit that point in being a QA when I lose empathy for the agents and have started hating the poorly performing ones for sucking so badly... I caught myself being way too critical when marking though, so maybe there's still hope... I don't want to be a stereotypically awful QA. 
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Sep 24, 2012 17:55
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I think with our center you have to be bi-sexual at minimum to work in QA.
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Sep 25, 2012 03:53
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cuntvalet posted:It happened today, guys. I hit that point in being a QA when I lose empathy for the agents and have started hating the poorly performing ones for sucking so badly... Just make sure you distinguish between those who've had the training and coaching they need and those who haven't. The former are deserving of your loathing.
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Sep 25, 2012 07:09
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cuntvalet posted:It happened today, guys. I hit that point in being a QA when I lose empathy for the agents and have started hating the poorly performing ones for sucking so badly... For what it's worth, the QA's I've worked with over the last 8 years have pretty much all been cool people with decent jobs who had a genuine desire to help. Policy and reality often hamstrung them, but every single one I've known has been decent. Some agents are just poo poo, you can't get around it. Most aren't though, most will behave once they understand what your particular company means by "behave". That actually leads into the problem I've having right now. I've spent my whole adult life in call centers, all customer service. 4 years on the phone, 4 years as 'resource planning' / 'backup AND frontline IT guy' (the site got charged for tickets. I fixed a lot of poo poo and prevented a lot of tickets. It was nice. I was an idiot.) After my SECOND 'overseas labor is cheaper, good loving luck!" layoff and site closure + Life Ruination, I tried a short stint in retail (BestBuy. gently caress that, but only due to the lack of pay/hours. I actually kinda enjoyed the job itself.) I've taken a sales position at a HUGE company. The culture is different, but that I can live with. It's the sales mentality that drives me batshit. I've gone from "what can I do for the customer to help the company?" to "What can I convince/lie/cheat the customer into doing for ME to help ME?", and gently caress the company/brand/anything other than the sales numbers my continued employment depends upon. This is policy and culture where I am, we regard "not quite true, but not a lie" statements as poo poo for the Service department to deal with. We're trained to spout these sorts of statements constantly, to let the customer make implications based on what we've said that are utterly untrue, but no harm on us, since we didn't actually say that. All that would be an issue, but a manageable one. The real issue is that about a month before I got hired, Resource Planning hosed up their forecasts horribly. I've spent years doing that sort of spreadsheet-math, so I know it when I see it. They thought they'd be WAY busier than they actually are, for whatever reason. They told HR they needed a fuckton more people, and HR hired a fuckton more people (including myself.) Once reality set in, and they had atrocious occupancy numbers due to lack of volume, there was apparently a pow-wow between departments. My department head said "we need more volume!", despite the fact that he's in SALES, and SALES are what matter, not volume. Another department head said "I know, I'll make it a yearly scorecard goal for all my people to transfer 25% of their calls to your department!", and every loving idiot in the room apparently nodded. Note that this is a switch-report goal, not a Quality one. It doesn't matter what happens once you transfer that call, it only matters that the switch records you making the transfer. So now my massive wave of new-hires is hitting the phones, with goals that made sense two years ago when the only people we spoke to were people who called us on purpose. But now, half our calls are brainless transfers from the other department. Those folks want to make bonus, they want their scorecards to look good for raises, and they know they need to send calls our way. So half the time they say "please hold while I check on a discount for you" and then blind transfer the fucker to us. We can't do anything with these people in sales, they've got no interest in our product, and no money to pay for it with. But we're still rated on the same 5 year old "sales per call" metric. They wonder why 80% of the newhires can't meet the loving goal, and why the tenured agents are bitching up a storm about being on the verge of firing due to sales metrics. It drives me batshit  I just want to get back into RP where I can crunch numbers all day and explain how poo poo really works to clueless higher-ups. It's what I'm good at.
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Sep 27, 2012 07:28
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So here's a question: I've never worked in a call center during a big national election. Just yesterday I had 2 people ask me who I was voting for, and go on tirades about Obama. Is this likely to ramp up further as we get close to the day itself? I'm pretty open to debate with anyone about politics, but I know that's verboten when you're representing a company as a call center rep. Bleh.
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Sep 30, 2012 20:11
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Loving Life Partner posted:So here's a question: Oh man. I work in escalations for a student loan servicer who is contracted out by the Department of Education. We have people ranting and raving about Obama and the government constantly, about the repayment plans, the federal laws we have to follow, what gets subsidized and what doesn't and the interest rates constantly. At first I would get defensive, but by now, my general response is something along the lines of 'Well, yeah, your interest rates are high. But take into consideration the fact that if you become totally and permanently disabled, your loans can be forgiven. If you die, your family will not owe your debt. If you become unemployed or have an economic hardship, the government will not only postpone your payments, but also cover some of your interest. Also, the people who are handling your loans have strict regulations that they must follow to ensure that your best interests are put first. Other debt does not do that. Plus, your interest goes back into the system to pay for other people's loans, just like how other people have paid for yours.' But you still get those people that want to get nasty politically, which always drives me nuts because I would love to let loose at them for being racist assholes or homophobic bigots, but I'm representing the federal government and my calls can be listened to, so we all have to walk a very fine line on politics on the phones.
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Oct 1, 2012 02:09
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Loving Life Partner posted:So here's a question: It probably will. I handle political questions the same way I handle religious questions - "Sorry, I'm not able to/prefer not to discuss politics/religion at work. I appreciate your interest though. Is there anything else I can do for you today?" Usually they get the hint and we move on.
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Oct 1, 2012 16:47
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you ate my cat posted:It probably will. I handle political questions the same way I handle religious questions - "Sorry, I'm not able to/prefer not to discuss politics/religion at work. I appreciate your interest though. Is there anything else I can do for you today?" Usually they get the hint and we move on. This is the best thing to say. Usually I just completely ignore political comments of any kind or act completely neutral. My callcenter released information that they're going to let more people work from home! I would completely love working from home and never seeing my more annoying co-workers ever again. I just need to install a landline in my apartment, which my landlord okayed.
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Oct 6, 2012 00:42
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Out of the blue on Thursday my manager pulled me into the HR department, with one of the HR ladies, my supervisor and himself. They explained that "the client" had listened to a bunch of my calls from like...months and months ago and decided I was not an "appropriate" example of what they want as a QA. Regardless of the fact that these calls were months and months ago. Regardless of the fact that I'm the only person who gets all their audits and coachings done on time. Regardless of the fact that the agents I've coached have seen dramatic improvements on their QA scores. Oh, but it's all alright, because instead of getting fired as "the client" would have liked...I get to go back to being an agent. You know. That job that I absolutely hated and was desperate to escape in the first place. So, no more stable hours. No more chance to get a raise. No more trying to help people (and succeeding). No more going for lunch whenever I please. No more using the washroom whenever I need to. No more being able to send outbound emails. No more ability to choose whether or not I work holidays because I'll be needed for phone queue. And apparently I have to write a letter defending my "actions" during calls and if I do write it, it's not going toward anything other than telling "my side" of the story. It's not like it goes towards helping me keep my QA position. They expect me to start back on the phones on Tuesday and I nearly told them I wanted to quit right then and there because I hated being an agent so much. But I didn't. Because I have an apartment to pay for and student loans and I think I'd hate being homeless more. But how am I supposed to go back to being an agent, after I've coached and worked with my peers on the floor? It's humiliating and embarassing. I'm ashamed and desperate to find a new job, fast. I...I don't know what I'm going to do.
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Oct 6, 2012 01:33
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Man up and either do A) do the phone job or B) find a new job? Really your only options here.
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Oct 6, 2012 01:37
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Bovril Delight posted:Man up and either do A) do the phone job or B) find a new job? Really your only options here. I've been frantically looking for a job since this happened, so that I could just quit and not have to face all of that. But in this town it's part time retail or factory work if you can't drive and don't have specialized skills. So, it's not exactly easy as all that.
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Oct 6, 2012 01:45
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cuntvalet posted:Out of the blue on Thursday my manager pulled me into the HR department, with one of the HR ladies, my supervisor and himself. That really sucks, and I don't want to downplay it. But I don't think you need to worry about your peers judging you, because honestly... everyone knows what a call center's like. No one's going to think less of you.
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Oct 6, 2012 03:30
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RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS posted:That really sucks, and I don't want to downplay it. But I don't think you need to worry about your peers judging you, because honestly... everyone knows what a call center's like. No one's going to think less of you. They act like they did me a favor in keeping me on as an agent but ironically...I think it would have been less stressful had they just fired me, I could get my severence/EI and throw all of my time into finding a different job.
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Oct 6, 2012 04:53
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Welp I was loving this new call center but had a really lovely experience today. Had a customer of mine ( I do auto and personal loans) call wanting a personal loan for some specific bed. Apparently it's a 5000 dollar bed, but whatever man it's your money and not our concern what you do with it! He had a TON of products with us, and has been with us for more than half a century! I figured for sure he would get approved. The call goes to review, so I call them and basically tell the reviewer there is no reason the guy shouldn't get the loan. They disagree, and refuse it. So I go back to the guy and tell him the news, he seems like he is fine with it. “Oh yea I understand just one more expense for an old man and they probably think I can't handle it” and we chit chatted for a while (we have no handle time metric) and then he left and I went back to my normal job of telling people 6 years younger than me that they get to buy a brand new Mercedes with that 50,000 dollar loan, ugh. That was Wednesday, today during work the head coach is acting kinda strange, listening really intently to a call, and not that I was trying to hear, but I heard my name once or twice in the conversations she was having with the group of coaches. She even calls over another rep to listen and I figure oh lord I have done something terribly wrong. I was waiting for them to tell me to log out of the phones and just go home. So she approaches me at the end of the shift and asks me if I remember a call with an older fellow who wanted a special bed, and I said I did and actually asked if he was able to get it approved. I was rooting for this old guy honestly. Then she tells me he called my company directly and complained specifically about me. Stating that I was the rudest, most unhelpful person and that I gave him NO explanation as to why he didn't get the loan and that I must have been doing it to spite him. Just ruined my day.  Luckily she had listened to the whole call multiple times and by that point so had every coach on the floor and they said not only was I NOT rude in any way, but that I was going out of my way to try to help the old guy FAR above and beyond what I needed to. They actually put in a dispute with the company AGAINST the customers claim. That's just so cool to me that my new boss that I’ve known for about a week is willing to not only say “Hey you didn't gently caress up” but is willing to tell the company that they are wrong for me is really awesome. It's bittersweet though, because I've learned never to trust the customers, but at the same time learning that I can ACTUALLY put a modicum of trust in the coaches here!  I also got a free lunch out of it 
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Oct 6, 2012 06:02
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cuntvalet posted:Out of the blue on Thursday my manager pulled me into the HR department, with one of the HR ladies, my supervisor and himself. My first instinct here is that they need to cut costs in QA or return a skilled agent so they went digging for dirt. I don't know what happened during these calls, maybe it was legitimately awful, but judging your current performance on your old performance is ... Exactly the kind of retarded call centres thrive on ... Work in a factory or get two retail jobs, poo poo go to another call centre and see if you can QA there - you're never going to progress at this place if they were supposed to fire you now.
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Oct 6, 2012 09:01
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cuntvalet posted:They act like they did me a favor in keeping me on as an agent but ironically...I think it would have been less stressful had they just fired me, I could get my severence/EI and throw all of my time into finding a different job. That's why they didn't fire you. It's easier and cheaper for them if you just quit, so they're giving you the worst possible position they can. If 'poo poo Eater Level 1' existed, you'd have been offered that. It sucks and I'm sorry to hear it but I spent 9 years in the culture and watched a lot of people who got off the phones and into specialist/support positions get utterly, utterly hosed.
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Oct 6, 2012 10:11
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This week is outstanding customer service week, we got a nice company branded hoodie, a smoothie/coffee bar one day, and a hot brunch yesterday (scrambled eggs, sausage, juices, fresh fruit). It's pretty nice
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Oct 6, 2012 12:24
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Loving Life Partner posted:This week is outstanding customer service week, we got a nice company branded hoodie, a smoothie/coffee bar one day, and a hot brunch yesterday (scrambled eggs, sausage, juices, fresh fruit). It's pretty nice For us it's called Customer Care week. We got T-shirts, free cupcakes, a cooked brunch on Thursday and on Friday a huge grilling thing with steak and chicken. It was awesome.
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Oct 6, 2012 14:19
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For customer service week, I got a piece of cake and 4 hershey's kisses.  They raffle poo poo off for people who do a bunch of loving crossword puzzles, but they don't give us time to do them. I think it'd be better for morale to cater a small lunch on Friday instead of giving a chance to win one of 20 $10 gift cards. I'll be damned if I'm going to work off the clock for a chance at 45 minutes' worth of pay.
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Oct 6, 2012 14:45
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Was it customer service week everywhere? We got raffle tickets based on 'being caught displaying XYZ values', depending on what day of the week it was. What it really came down to was supervisors just coming around and giving you raffle tickets. Some guy won a cooler. Yay...
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Oct 6, 2012 15:08
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Our customer service week was amazing. Got to play playstation and 360 during breaks. Free burgers, free doughnuts. All kinds of awesome stuff this week. Goofy hat day had someone wearing an optimus prime mask, which isn't really a hat, but still awesome.
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Oct 6, 2012 17:11
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It was customer service week for us too. We got to wear jeans, but we still had mandatory dress code days (every one has to wear a certain color shirt, everyone has to wear a hat another day, etc). I remember our first customer service week. To make a fun experience for us over-scheduled, hyper-micro-managed CSRs, management decided to schedule a mandatory pep rally during our unpaid lunch breaks. Also, the people who worked late hours had their lunch break moved to the beginning of their eight-hour shift for the pep rally, so some people were on the phones for seven hours without having a chance to get a real meal. The mandatory unpaid pep rally thing happened a second time, with a manager I hated sending a huge e-mail to the whole department about how we better not change our schedules around. That time I called our anonymous hr ethics reporting line to file a report about it, and at least the whole department got overtime pay.
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Oct 6, 2012 17:41
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legsarerequired posted:It was customer service week for us too. We got to wear jeans, but we still had mandatory dress code days (every one has to wear a certain color shirt, everyone has to wear a hat another day, etc). How the hell do deranged things like this happen? 
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Oct 6, 2012 17:47
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How in the hell do people get this disconnected from reality. Just order some pizzas or something, drat.
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Oct 6, 2012 18:18
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We just had "Employee Appreciation Week", which sounds nice and if you're a new person I can see you getting tricked into thinking management appreciates you, except all the little events like free donuts and poo poo was funded by our social committee, and the social committee is run by agents and funded by donations from agents, so it was more like we all bought ourselves some donuts. edit: Oh no wait, management deigned to let us wear jeans all week. Cryptozoology fucked around with this message at 05:52 on Oct 7, 2012 |
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Oct 7, 2012 05:42
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We...didn't get anything for any sort of Employee appreciation or Customer Service Appreciation week. So...go us?
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Oct 7, 2012 05:52
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For customer service week, all of the supervisors in the other office that we have call center reps in decided to completely leave the floor to work on their customer service week and leave me to deal with specialized escalations for two locations and all of the sup issues and questions for their location. For 4 hours. When I was the only one working in my department. Without telling me. It was terrible. But I got some time off coupons for it because the other supervisors at the other location were appalled. So... at least I have that. And I won crazy hat day!
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Oct 8, 2012 00:16
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Today was my first day on the phones all on my own. It's amazing how quickly I fall back into call center mode. On the plus side, most customers are friendly and chill and the calls go pretty long so it makes the day go faster. At least all my supervisors are impressed with my phone manner. I guess my years of call center experience are good for something after all...more call center work. 
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Oct 10, 2012 02:13
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HR insisted that everyone who attended the pep rally get paid for the time they were at a company event. The managers were pretty pissed that anyone would report it, and some of them still complain about it. Some of the higher-ups seem to be surprised that we don't get bathroom breaks and stuff. One of them suggested to me that maybe people would have better stats if their working conditions improved. I have no idea how any of this will get better if there isn't a way to hold management accountable for annoying stuff.
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Oct 10, 2012 19:02
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Yesterday was my first day back on the phones as an agent. I'm locked out of at least 3 of my tools, stressed,could only resolve like...3 calls. I'm not sure how much longer I can do this call centre stuff for.
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Oct 10, 2012 19:33
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I work in a call centre, and if we need to go to the loo we just put ourselves into a specific aux code and go. the amount of time is monitored to some extent, but so long as you're not obviously screwing around it's fine. I don't understand how you're expected to last 4 hours at a time without going to the loo at least once, particularly if you're trying to stay properly hydrated. I would have to stop drinking water, and would probably get a sore throat and end up sick.
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Oct 10, 2012 22:27
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newtestleper posted:I work in a call centre, and if we need to go to the loo we just put ourselves into a specific aux code and go. the amount of time is monitored to some extent, but so long as you're not obviously screwing around it's fine. Yeah, any management with half a brain is just going to let you go when you need to and manage the outliers. I mean, that's basically all performance management has to be in a call centre, managing the outliers.
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Oct 10, 2012 22:36
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They installed some new Internet monitor today and it blocks pretty much every site I visited before  But now SA isn't blocked 
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Oct 11, 2012 03:12
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