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Modern Day Hercules posted:Man y'all got it rough. Call time isn't even a recorded metric where I work. One time a dude put me on hold and forgot about me and I let it sit on hold for over a half hour. I've fantasized about this happening to me some days. But no, they always remember I am on hold...*sigh*
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Mar 9, 2014 23:16
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It would happen pretty often to me (like once a week) that instead of hanging up, the cx would just put the phone down or on hold. Sadly my call time was counted but those minutes I could squeeze out were so precious. The silence was so precious. I did get caught though but they didn't really cared.
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Mar 9, 2014 23:34
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Oh boy, you guys can't even imagine how little I care about my job right now. I'm like 40 days out from leaving forever. Walking out that door for the last time, mmmm mm. EDIT: Seems like the right time too, as the performance gestapo seems to be clamping down here. Apparently a full year of bad answer performance is finally spurring changes. Are we hiring more reps? Maybe, but they're implementing something called "performance based scheduling" which after watching a video sounds like they'll be changing your schedule at will every 6 months to a year after evaluating business needs. Also we're getting new phone systems and new routing technology, which someone indicated was similiar to another call center they worked at where they could track people more individually throughout the day and probably start sending people home with bad performance on slower days. Loving Life Partner fucked around with this message at 17:11 on Apr 3, 2014 |
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Apr 3, 2014 17:09
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New position requires only 4 hours a day on the phone. So far, I like it, and even the phone portion isn't too bad. Except for on thing... Each day, we get an email stating who met productivity standards and who did not, written in a dickish tone, by a senior manager who's not even in our center. I had the day off yesterday (got a new dog, wanted to get him acclimated to his new home). Came in today to this email: Hello, you were on the phones for 0% of the time you were scheduled. Please provide your manager an explanation as to why. I shot back an email to him and copied in my manager stating: Hello, Please refer to the vacation calendar screenshot listed below. I was approved for this day off. I will be on the phones at my scheduled time today. If you have any further questions, contact my manager. Thank you! This apparently pissed him off...but it got results! Email was later sent to the entire team from my manager stating "we will be handling this differently starting tomorrow. However, if you have to email him or anyone else, please be positive and professional." Provided I don't get a write up (99% chance of not) I won!
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Apr 10, 2014 17:06
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I think you handled it perfectly. You can always claim that you thought you were being polite and accurate.
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Apr 10, 2014 17:22
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blackmet posted:New position requires only 4 hours a day on the phone. So far, I like it, and even the phone portion isn't too bad. Except for on thing...
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Apr 10, 2014 17:51
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Nocheez posted:I think you handled it perfectly. You can always claim that you thought you were being polite and accurate. Nocheez posted:I think you handled it perfectly. You can always claim that you thought you were being polite and accurate. I think I was being polite. A bit firm, as at the VERY least he should be checking that kind of thing before making the schedule and sending the email accusing me of being a slacker.
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Apr 10, 2014 18:23
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Loving Life Partner posted:Oh boy, you guys can't even imagine how little I care about my job right now. I'm like 40 days out from leaving forever. Walking out that door for the last time, mmmm mm. Are they talking about doing any sort of preferences for your schedules or shift bidding? Because if you get stuck with straight up "match supply to demand" scheduling then depending on how they configure it you can get seriously hosed over. The software will just poo poo out a load of schedules that your resource and planning team (or whatever you call them) then assign people to. It's great for meeting demand but it's loving horrible for staff.
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Apr 10, 2014 18:28
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They're going to be doing a ranking system, where your overall performance metrics and rank in the company determines what schedules you'll have access to. It still sounds incredibly hosed to me. There's a lot of questions they aren't answering yet, because this won't go into effect until next year (and I couldn't possibly care less), but yeah.
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Apr 10, 2014 19:15
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Yeah, that sounds like shift bids, but with "seniority" (which a lot of places use for working out who gets the shift if multiple people want it) swapped out for a performance metric. That is almost certainly going to suck for the people left there when it goes live.
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Apr 10, 2014 19:37
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blackmet posted:New position requires only 4 hours a day on the phone. So far, I like it, and even the phone portion isn't too bad. Except for on thing... martyrdumb posted:There is literally no need for this type of communication to be coming straight from a higher-up to an employee. That's why bullshit middle managers exist, to make sure that you aren't bothered by this poo poo. You should only be discussing your metrics in a weekly/monthly meeting with YOUR manager. Hopefully dumbass gets a slap on the wrist from above, because he was going about it all wrong in the first place.
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Apr 11, 2014 02:42
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My old department had public metrics, but you really wouldn't be talked to about them by anyone but your manager. I was actually in charge of sending out a weekly email that had everyone on my team listed on it, along with metrics used to determine if you bonus. I usually sent it with no comment, though near the end of each quarter I might say "two weeks left to go. If you see something you don't like, nows your chance to change it!" This department is much smaller. With no public stats. And actually no formal metrics for the phones as of yet. What the manager was doing was saying "Thank you to (list of people who met my arbitrary standard). There were x # of people who didn't meet my arbitrary standard. Please send your manager an email stating why." Then you'd get a private email like the one I got before. Me and another guy did get pulled into a conference room by our direct managers to be told our emails were a bit "icy," but they understood why we were upset. The manager sending this out has never managed people on the phones before. Mine was a phone rep for 16 years before moving on to management. That sort of stuff used to irritate him too. The manager monitoring this now just going to send the info to them, they'll talk to us if they have questions. We even had a chance to discuss possible things that could be done to make things a bit easier and more efficient in general, on both the processing and phone side. It actually wasn't bad. And I met the arbitrary standards in my phone shift yesterday.
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Apr 11, 2014 14:44
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I'm getting out! Sort of. Maybe. Eventually. I've got a secondment in a new department (no more speaking to customers!) that was meant to start on the 28th of April. Two of my friends also got jobs in this department, but on a different team, and were due to start on the 22nd. Thursday they get an email from our new department saying that, due to "business demands" in our current department, their start date has been delayed until the 5th of May. Nothing comes to me but my friend gives me a heads up just in case, and goes for a meeting with our boss. He claims to know nothing about it. Yesterday we go in to find an email from the head of our department apologising, saying we weren't supposed to find out like this, nothing's been agreed, but to make it easier we're all now going to start on the 5th. Er... what? If my friend hadn't said anything to me I'm wondering when they would've bothered to mention something was up. So I'm kind of pissed at this point but there's not much I can do about it, I'm not about to start arguing with the department Head. In the afternoon I get called over by our boss again. He says they've had a chat with our new department and arranged something different. He claims that basically the issue is we're not hiring enough staff - this is completely wrong. The issue is the training. Over the last few months they've decided to merge the sales and service teams into one big team where everyone does everything. I guess that kind of makes sense. However, they've also decided that sales always comes first. So, all the new hires, including the 15 we took on a few weeks ago, will be trained on motor sales first, 3 months later on service, 3 months later on household sales, 3 months later service. That means it's going to take an entire year to replace anyone who leaves household service - and guess where I work? And almost everyone else who's left over the past couple of months? And where we're busiest? We've explained to everyone we can that this is really really dumb and is going to leave us incredibly short handed but nobody seems to care. Sales come first, after all!  In the meantime, starting the 28th we're going to do the morning in our current department and the afternoon in our new department, for 3 weeks. For me that's not perfect but at least it's a start. For the two other guys (who are actually going up a paygrade) who knows what's going to happen.Oh, at 4:55 when my boss emailed me to tell me he meant the 22nd. Does that mean I start the 22nd? Or will this half and half period end the 22nd? Who knows because he went home straight away.
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Apr 12, 2014 12:53
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"Well, I can take this job or figure out how to eat air, how bad could it possibly be?" 2 Months pass... "gently caress you india, gently caress your entire poo poo stain of a country! " "HELLO? hEllo? hello?" After rattling off some broken English 4 paragraph opening where I might have caught 3 words in 12 the loving moment they stop to catch a breath the Indian hello drills into my sanity. Of course this assumes the cellphone they jammed in a goat's rear end to get better reception didn't cut out 2 minutes into their thesis about why I should give them things. Also you should absolutely speak a language you are not fluent in as fast as humanely possible, it makes you vastly more understandable. If the mean man on the phone informs you he doesn't understand/there is no hindi support just call back, they must have a secret hindi speaking person just dying to help you. I wasn't expecting to love this job ever but the promise of hourly plus bonus for sales sounded reasonable. How do you qualify for a bonus? Rate of calls converted to sales. Surely the rampant "Tech support doesn't work overnights, we'll just ask the sales team!" and india callers don't count against you for that though, that would be insane! It sure Training "Ask open ended questions to determine customer needs" Reality "Oh how lovely someone has to listen to me, let me tell them my life story while not answering the question." Answer the question asked in a short and concise fashion? What kind of madman are you! Yes, when I asked for your order number for your complex fuckfest of failure that shouldn't even be happening on my phone what I secretly meant was send me a tracking number, that is literally the same thing. Good thing I went above and beyond to help you with this by inviting you to email me those order numbers since when you actually called you had nothing at all to indicate the issue you described had even happened. I.. no... no your virus scan can't run when the machine is.. off... [mute botton, only you can conceal my sobs of dismay] Sir what I meant when I said what you're asking me is literally impossible is that even if I wanted to do what you just described it is literally not possible. I don't mean "This would somehow effect me or my pay in a negative way so I won't do what you just dreamed up I could do to "satisfy" you" Your idiotic misconception that customer service means doing whatever stupid thing you just invented in your mind not withstanding what I actually am telling you, repeatedly and patiently, is what you are asking for is not possible. No no, ignore me telling you all the ways I could possibly try to help you, don't strain yourself with trying to work with me at all. Sure I'd be happy to get a supervisor to explain the concept not possible to you, maybe he has a degree in special education that will better qualify him. The cynical voice told me I'd be getting calls from people who are literally incapable of using a website to buy things, optimistic voice told me I would be getting less technical people who just needed to discuss options with a helpful upbeat phone guy. Optimist voice was actually nursing a million dollar a day crack habit, it seems.
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Apr 14, 2014 20:37
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I'm so glad I'm not a core customer service rep right now... Shift bids are coming for them. Rumor is everyone is getting pushed to a 4 day week. Which is nice, sometimes, but can be a bear if you have kids in daycare and stuff. Also, the number of hours each shift is won't be consistent. You'll get 40 hours, but it might be 3 12 hour days and a 4 hour one. Or 11 one day, 9 the next, 12 the next, and then an 8. People hate that. And are updating their resumes. Mine has decided to do a shift bid EVERY quarter. You get 4 options: 7-3:30, 7:30-4, 8-4:30, or 8:30-5. All Monday-Friday. 90% of people wanted the 7-3:30, so the manager is going to try to rotate who gets that each quarter. I get wanting to keep everyone happy, but it's not like anyone has particularily awful hours in this department. I got the 8:30-5, which wasn't my first choice, but still works OK for public transport and such. I just don't see the need to do a mega shuffle every three months because Johnny is whining about having to do a 7:30-4 rather than a 7-3:30 because his 5 mile drive might take an extra 10 minutes. It's not like we're making you work until midnight. Suck it up! Most people here have crazy hours. It's the nature of the beast. Be happy you're not in the core customer service lines and getting some nutso 11AM to 9:30 PM shift that includes weekends.
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Apr 25, 2014 14:54
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Oh man management is pissed today cause someone put a screenshot attachment in one of our tickets that had a client's SSN in it.
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Apr 25, 2014 15:47
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blackmet posted:I'm so glad I'm not a core customer service rep right now...
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Apr 25, 2014 15:57
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The thing is, none of the hours are that bad at all. I prefer the later start times myself. My first choice was 8-4:30 because that lets me take a light rail that gets me downtown when buses run to my area every 5 minutes. 8:30-5 means I'll be getting downtown when they're running more like every 10-15, which is still acceptable, so no biggie.
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Apr 25, 2014 17:50
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I've worked 4x10's for years now and I still can't decide if I like them or not. It's so down the line. The extra long days blow, but right now I work Monday through Thursday. Walking out the door Thursday into a 3 day weekend every weekend is the greatest feeling in the world.
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Apr 25, 2014 17:57
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I had a 4x10 Mon, Tue, Fri, Sat when i first started at my current firm. I kind of liked it. Have a bad day? At most, you're working one more before a day off. On Saturdays we didn't have to be in until 10, so you could still go out Friday night and be OK enough to handle Saturday.
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Apr 25, 2014 19:50
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blackmet posted:I'm so glad I'm not a core customer service rep right now... So people are bitching that they have to work regular office hours, the horror.
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Apr 28, 2014 16:30
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sbaldrick posted:So people are bitching that they have to work regular office hours, the horror.
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Apr 28, 2014 17:25
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Had a 90 minute on the clock meeting today, got stretched into 2.5 hours by idiots with dumb questions, was just cheering wildly inside my brain the whole time whenever they piped up.
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Apr 29, 2014 23:37
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Loving Life Partner posted:Had a 90 minute on the clock meeting today, got stretched into 2.5 hours by idiots with dumb questions, was just cheering wildly inside my brain the whole time whenever they piped up. God bless the idiots with dumb questions. Sometimes I wonder if they cultivate that just to get more time offline.
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May 1, 2014 00:40
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If they do, then bravo. Granted, it was a pretty important massive change that's coming to my company that they had questions about (scheduling is getting entirely redone and everyone is getting new schedules in 2015), but still. Also just way too much concern about something that won't even be mock tested until August and not even implemented until April of 2015, including some really lovely petty griping about unrelated issues. EDIT: Put my two weeks notice in today. My boss was kinda sad, she's a sweet heart honestly, even if she sucks poo poo at management in some ways. It was funny how she tried to subtly impress upon me that I shouldn't slack off because I'm leaving in 2 weeks, bwahahahahaha. Welcome to the last two weeks of employment at a call center, where the guidelines are made up and the metrics don't matter! I'll definitely be phoning it in but not outright avoiding my job. Loving Life Partner fucked around with this message at 02:23 on May 1, 2014 |
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May 1, 2014 00:43
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Loving Life Partner posted:
Hey, leave that to the customers 
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May 1, 2014 05:08
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Hello call center thread I'm posting from Gurgaon India where it is 109 F out and our AC died and I have seven hours left to go in my shift. I just had to post that somewhere because holy poo poo this is hell. At least call volume is down today.
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May 1, 2014 14:51
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Jibo posted:Hello call center thread I'm posting from Gurgaon India where it is 109 F out and our AC died and I have seven hours left to go in my shift.  That loving sucks. Just out of curiosity, do you have air conditioning at home? My ex-boss (from my old insurance company) visited EXL in India. I don't remember what city, though. From how she described it, there were some really nice places right next to slums. People eating out of the gutter... stuff like that. The pictures she took were fascinating.
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May 1, 2014 16:32
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martyrdumb posted:
Sounds a lot like where I'm staying. AC in the guest house may have took a poo poo this afternoon but I'll deal with that in a couple hours here. One of our wall units in the office is working and being the resident American I was offered a seat under it. An agent passed out about an hour and a half ago and now everyone else is refusing to work (I agree with them) and I've passed it up to our department head back in the states and he's acting like there's nothing he can do. I've been in India for two and a half weeks and it looks like I'll be dealing with a strike already. E: to boot, the water cooler died too so we are all drinking warm water.
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May 1, 2014 20:14
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Loving Life Partner posted:If they do, then bravo. Um, I always made up bullshit questions during meetings. Also kudos to you for putting in your two weeks. I was just so fed up that I quit and left the same day I got an offer for an office job.
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May 3, 2014 00:05
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I need the money so yeah. Otherwise I'd be gone.
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May 4, 2014 03:37
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Welp, my company decided to put forth an "American front" so they've set our US agents to high priority for all inbound contacts. This includes our Tier 2 agents and our Tier 2 Manager / India call center floor manager (that's me). So we have 10 US agents to cover 24/7 support with average interaction volume of around 800 per weekday and 300 per weekend day. With me stuck in India in a hot rear end call center where there is no food (Indian or otherwise) and doing nothing but taking calls all day long. Woo... I'm thinking about just saying gently caress it and buying my own plane ticket back home.
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May 15, 2014 13:52
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Loving Life Partner posted:I need the money so yeah. Otherwise I'd be gone. You work at Progressive right? In the Customer Service center?
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May 15, 2014 17:31
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Jastiger posted:You work at Progressive right? In the Customer Service center? As of 3PM yesterday, no! But yes I did.
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May 15, 2014 17:48
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Loving Life Partner posted:As of 3PM yesterday, no! But yes I did. Where? And what are you going to do now?
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May 15, 2014 18:10
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Colorado Springs office. My wife and I are moving to Illinois, the Chicago area. Dunno what I'll be doing next, trying to stay away from phones.
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May 15, 2014 18:28
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Loving Life Partner posted:Colorado Springs office. My wife and I are moving to Illinois, the Chicago area. Dunno what I'll be doing next, trying to stay away from phones. Ah ok ok. Was just curious. I'm in DSM working for Nationwide doing what you did, I think, except I'm sales, not customer service.
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May 15, 2014 18:29
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Loving Life Partner posted:Colorado Springs office. My wife and I are moving to Illinois, the Chicago area. Dunno what I'll be doing next, trying to stay away from phones.
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May 15, 2014 20:43
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Hello, call centre thread. It's nice to see there are fellow soldiers in the endless war against management, the client, and the callers. I'm outsourced at Aditya Birla Minacs for a national postal corporation and oh my God, it's like the management and the client are consipiring to gently caress us over as many ways as the possibly can. There is a minimum wage increase coming along in June and it looks like everyone making even a fraction above minimum wage won't be seeing an increase! I've been at our pay cap of $12.45 for over two years now and there's no sign I'll ever make more than that until minimum goes above it. I work in six different queues, get switched around with no notice, and have an increasingly vicious battle each month when schedule bidding comes around. The sole benefit to working in the number of queues I'm in is that I don't work weekends. Woo!
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May 16, 2014 02:21
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I've worked in a call center for almost 3 years and I've finally reached the end of my rope I have to rant about it somewhere, and probably no one would appreciate it more than fellow sufferers. I've been with the same company the entire time. When I started it was in debt collections, and let me just say, I'm an introvert, I don't like talking to people all day, but I figured it was entry-level, if I did my time I'd get out into other departments. Well, 8 months pass and a new department is starting to support employees who call in for the customers about their debts so the regular joes can focus more on contacting the customers for arrangements, and would I like to be part of the first group? Hell yeah! 8 months in and I'm already moving up! It was slow at first but now I didn't have to worry about hitting a monthly goal in dollars, call times were abolished, everything was much more laid back, it was great. Slowly though things started to change. Oh, you want us to take after-hours calls for another department we're not trained in and have no access to their systems just to be a live answering machine? Okay I guess, there's not too many. Oh, you're starting a new system that labels every customer's profile with a debt to contact us even though we're an internal department and it's going to literally (I saw the figures) triple our calls per day even though we have the same number of people as when we started and we have to do mandatory overtime for the next six months? And the actual debt department has been told to transfer employees that call them to us? And if they take any money from the customer their number is still listed for it so there's a hundred misroutes a day? And if a customer is put through to us we're not allowed to transfer? Well... okay that's crummy but we're hiring more people now so it'll slow down. Oh, you're going to change our shifts every 6 months and we have no say in the matter besides bidding? Well, I have a flexible schedule so I can roll with it. Oh, now we need to actively collect on the debts when the employee calls in and the customer is there? Well, might as well so we don't have to route them all over. Oh, now we need to read 5 more disclosures on every call that takes an extra two minutes and if we dare to end the call with a yes/no question like "Was there anything else I could help you with today?" instead of an open-ended question we fail our quality? Oh, now you've eliminated the team lead position across all the collections departments so there's literally no way we can get mid-level managerial experience to further our career within the departments we've been trained in? That's pretty lovely. (Just FYI out of 4 managers I've bounced between due to schedule shifts EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. has gone collector> team lead> team manager). But then about 6 months ago they literally and brazenly turned us into a second debt department. Now instead of taking inbounds all day for employee and customer inquiries we actively make outbounds asking people to pay up. At first we all thought it was just to help the debt department, maybe they lost a lot of people, maybe their service levels were low, and we had plenty of people that we could afford to do it. It wasn't too bad at first, an hour or two a week, but then it slowly crept up until by December it was an all-day, all-week thing. Now we not only have to do the internal calls and the external ones but we get no incentive or bonus for dollars collected like the debt department AND they brought back call times and handle times. They didn't even dare to tell us it was a permanent feature until I challenged them at a team meeting in January. Out of the 30 people they hand-picked to found this department 2 years ago I am one of only 5 left, including a manager. We're losing people like flies, just this week alone we had 2 more people transfer out. I counted, we've lost about 66% of the people who were here just a year ago and we haven't hired since January. Instead they decided to just cross-train the debt department to handle our overflow when the internals get too high (even though if they're on their regular job they're still supposed to transfer employees that call in to them to us), and then the company has the gall to post on the company website about how it actively tries to keep the top employees. I've been trying to get out for months within the company because I don't want to just throw away 3 years of employment with them, but apparently I interview really terribly so it's been a no-go. I've just been doing less and less work, letting outbound debt calls hang and it's finally caught up to me; I got corrective action this week, and when you have that a lot of jobs for internal transfers state they won't consider you if it was within the last year. I'm going to have to look outside the company now and quit, because if I stay I'm going to get fired at some point and I don't want that stain on me. TL;DR: I worked in debt collections call center, I was offered a new job for inbound employee calls, after a year they turned us into another debt collections call center. Abandoned Toaster fucked around with this message at 08:52 on May 16, 2014 |
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May 16, 2014 08:46
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