cheap corporations suck

[corpslave.livejournal.com]

On Friday our manager took the day off, so our team lead decided to play "pretend I'm the manager" as he telecommuted.

Before I tell about his message, I must point out that 2 weeks ago, we were told that contractors (about 80 or 90 percent of this call center) and hourly employees of the company (everyone else excluding team leads) are no longer allowed to get overtime. The team that I'm on had at least 2 people logging overtime on a regular basis to fill the holes in our schedule. In the last 6 months, they have lost a couple of full-time employees. I got hired this month to replace one of the full-timers... but was only budgeted for 24 hours a week (the manager fought and eventually got me full-time). The overnight guy off was for his wedding and honeymoon the week after they announced this, so the coverage planned was shot to hell.

So back to the team lead. He shoots off individual e-mails to people with a list of things they need to improve on based on him monitoring their calls. After that, an e-mail goes out to the whole group about how we're forgetting to ask customers if we can help them with anything else after we resolve their issue. Also, we need to not sound rushed when we speak to customers... but make sure no call is left waiting in the queue for more than one minute. So one of the guys hits reply all and asks which is it, quantity or quality? The team lead's reply can be summed up as: "both".

With all this understaffing, my trainer has had almost no time to train me. The last 2 weeks I spent most of my time on a process where I use an automated process to send pings to the hundreds of properties (hotels) we support and then troubleshoot the ones that don't send one back. Now they expect me to start taking calls and stumbling through the various systems involved while my trainer listens and watches. In addition to not being trained on the systems they use, I have yet to learn the lingo of the hotel industry enough to figure out what they want in the first place. Too bad I need the paycheck, or I'd get out of there now.

Comments

[invader-kitty.livejournal.com]

Wow, you can answer calls within a minute? Where I work most customers are left waiting for anywhere between 10 and 60 minutes.

[tryss.livejournal.com]

this is VERY common in call centers.

1) contractors have no rights.
2) Quality or Quanity? one will usually suffer for the other. Money likes Quanitiy, Pride likes Quality. ah.. the eternal struggle.
3) No job security - face it, usually they hang it in front of you that "there's donzens of people out there that want your job, so do both or leave"
4) Quality reviews - Oh did you know, we require this new thing that you didn't know ahead of time so take the bad score and don't do it again. ok?
5) Beneifts? no, they only kick in if you've been with the company for 5+ years.

(chuckle) um, sorry.. (stepping off her soapbox) Move on.. no issues to see here....

[lrdjester.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it was like that when I was doing Win95 support at Keane.

I was one of the early support techs. I got the good training and such and when I started the contract with the Evil Empire was based on time. A one hour call and 6 ten minute calls came out the same. Then about five months later the contract was renegotiated. Payment was on a per call basis. Keane established that calls needed to stay under a twenty four minute average (I think) to make the same monetarily.

Anyway, about this time, the attrition started. A lot of techs left for the dot com startups in the area (Seattle). As a result, not as many calls were getting handled, so Keane started mass producing techs. The two week training (previously three week) was reduced to one. The stance Keane had was that they could teach anyone to troubleshoot Windoze.

Anyway, with the pressure to make call times shorter, the techs seemed to start competing for the lowest average call time for the day and the week. As a result, a lot of callers got a standard answer if something wasn't plainly evident, "FDisk, format and reinstall."

Customer Service went strait out the window. And what is worse, Keane management could care less and apparently the same is true for the Evil Empire, as the kept renewing the contract with Keane.


Anyway, I tortured myself by staying 19 month. I will never take a helpdesk job ever again.

[corpslave.livejournal.com]

The company's employee's get treated just as bad as the contractors around here. Everyone whispers how the whole call center will be in India in another year or so. They've slowly been transforming their employee base from regular employees to contractors. Word around the dept is that they want to make conditions so unbearable for the regular employees that they will leave on their own since the (blue) corporation can't just fire them all. Once it's all contractors, they can just let them go for no reason.

I've got a network admin job in the wings that a recruiter called me for... ironically, I've worked with the team on the client side of their system as a dba. Same corporation I'm ranting about now, but when you're supporting headquarters instead of external customers things are a little nicer. Plus I'd be indie instead of agency. *crosses fingers*