the work place halls echoes with the sounds...of salesmen.

[glennarbor.livejournal.com]

So all our local and regional sales staff are in house this week for meetings and fine company paid lunch buffets, living the high life as usual. Several of them call my boss (who's super cool) into a meeting and beret him for the wait time complaints they have been hearing from customers. He's prepared for this and has brought a stack of reports that basically show that we are ALL on the phone ALL the time. If somebody's waiting it's because truly nobody is available. Maybe it's because they laid off 6 level 1 reps 2 years ago and haven't replaced them. Or maybe it's because said salespeople promise features and functionality that don't exist, and once the install is done the customers end up calling support looking for this mystery feature.
As several of us suggested he openly invited the sales people to come spend a day or afternoon taking support calls to see what's it's really like, or even just to sit in and listen to us. Of course they all cringed in horror at that though and politely declined. Funny thing is later we got to counting, our company has more sales reps than support reps, that just seems flat out wrong.

Comments

Re: PROPS!!

[glennarbor.livejournal.com]

yeah i dig me some Rush, have you heard the newish covers album Feedback yet? holly hell it's good. Regarding the sales people, i'm pretty sure they couldn't walk 10 feet in my shoes, let alone a mile.

Re: PROPS!!

[glennarbor.livejournal.com]

yeah i've been a long time fan as well, circumstances even led to me playing a game of D&D with Alex when I was 14, what a thrill that was. Long story short my best friend in 9th grade, his grandma lived next door to Alex's aunt. He asked her if she could get a group of teenagers that might play d&d with him. We didn't play as much d&d as we did awwwe in the presence of greatness. Years later in retrospect I almost suspect he was doing field research for the song Subdivsions, which came out the next year.

[inahandbasket]

sorry to be a nazi...
Berate.
A beret is a hat. ^_^

[glennarbor.livejournal.com]

yeah i had my doubts but the spell check accepted it as it was, oh well.... thanks hitler.

[linguafranca.livejournal.com]

It was really funny, though.

[http://users.livejournal.com/shiara_/]

Oh, no, not corporate BS! The horror!

Don't talk to me about functionality issues. I've been doing system work for 2+ years and I'm constantly told why I don't have this functionality or that functionality. And I shake my head every time because 'this' functionality or 'that' functionality would ensure that the agent could get paid properly and reduce manual labour, but noooooooo....

[heleneotroy.livejournal.com]

As several of us suggested he openly invited the sales people to come spend a day or afternoon taking support calls to see what's it's really like, or even just to sit in and listen to us. Of course they all cringed in horror at that though and politely declined.

Our CEO instutute a policy that every department head must spend a hour every six months listening to the reps take calls. Its great, it really makes them respect us . . . for about 10 seconds.

. . . beret him for the wait time complaints . . .
SOooooooooooo, they made him wear little French hats?
*snicker*, sorry, I couldn't resist. ;)

[oddball42.livejournal.com]

i must lead a charmed life. because our supervisors and shift leads not only monitor calls but actually take calls themselves to either easy call spikes or to simply remind them what their slightly crazed reps deal with on the phone. and even the top of the food chain once in a while comes down to listen to calls (i think there was a rumor going aboutr that someone was ripping the tech he was listening to demanding the president and he broke into the call and told them what was up, but im not sure of that at all)

its actually pretty nie we dont run into the promised features that dont exist from in house staff. sometimes people reselling the product kind of interpret things oddly and well things get intereting from there.

[glennarbor.livejournal.com]

Yeah my direct supervisor who was once a support rep will take calls when needed, however rest of the company avoids this end of the building like it was nuclear waste dump.

[jahbulon.livejournal.com]

The company I work for had a promotion last year, very popular offer. They hired extra sales staff, oh yeah, but no new support staff at all. Thousands of new customers gained within a couple of months, all of whom we had to set-up and baby through the first few weeks of ADSL.

And they wanted to know why our service level was approaching 25% ! HAH

[taleya.livejournal.com]

Sounds like you work for my company......does the phrase "Dollar deal" make you twitch uncontrollably?

[jahbulon.livejournal.com]

It makes me feel all stabby.

[taleya.livejournal.com]

I am one of the weilders of the screwdriver of DOOM!