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Whether you are new to working in a call center on you are
an old hand, you understand how frustrating it can be at times. Customers can be very frustrating and so can
the usually less than competent people who are in charge. When you work in a call center there is
usually an attitude or policy that promotion comes from within the
company. So by sheer longevity people
are promoted regardless of whether or not they are qualified. That really is not my complaint though
because even under educated people can learn to be, or may be natural
leaders. My complaint is with the
company and the asinine policies that over educated but truly clueless people
come up with and enforce. The one policy
I would like to talk about in this post is about how the company will measure
their employees’ effectiveness, only one aspect of this though because you know
that when you work in a call center there are many, way too many criteria that
you are judged on. During certain times
of the year, or within certain cycles of the companies growth they will come up
with different criteria.
The company I work for has a higher than normal percentage
of its customer base coming out of contract this year so they implemented a
policy that will force their customer service agents to get people back into
contracts. While this may sound like a
great idea at a very high level, at a customer service level it is an
incredibly bad idea. Let’s examine the
life of the average person who works in a call center and it will give you a
better idea of why this is such a bad idea.
The average person who works in a call center is usually 1 of 2 types of
people. Young and new to the job force,
usually still going to school so they can get the hell out of working in such a
place, or middle aged and a perpetual job hopper who can never find the right
job to suit them. Maybe they are just an
unsettled person or most likely they are undereducated and have made very bad
decisions in their life up to the point where they start their first call
center job. I am not trying to suggest
that these people are bad, because most of them are the salt of the earth great
people who are always willing to help.
But they are people who are in a position that they need to keep their
jobs at any cost. Not the type of person
I would want to force to keep the customer base in contract. When these people a faced with either
complying with the desires of the company or losing their jobs they will make
decisions that are not conducive to maintaining a high ethical standard that
large corporations should be held to.
Don’t get me wrong I am not naive enough to believe that large
corporations are not out for the one thing that drives them, money. But at some point they should become concerned
or it will directly affect their bottom line.
Drive your customer base to the point of utter frustration and sooner or
later they will leave, contract or not.
The company makes it way too easy to keep its customer base
under contract by having policies that are designed to do just that. If a customer wants to make a change to the
plan they signed up for then it is an automatic 1 year contract extension for
the company allowing them to make that change.
That’s right if you want to pay the company more than you are currently
paying them, then in return they will extend your contract as a thank you for
paying them more each month. The company
has 2 identical price plans one of which is brand new and has a different
“catalog” number to it so technically if you change to the new one then you are
changing your plan and your contract will be extended by 1 year. Systematically this is a transparent change
but the contract still gets extended so if you don’t read the follow up letter
then you are under further obligation to the company with or without your
knowledge. The other way that I have
seen this happening is by giving the customer a free month of service as a
promotion to extend their contract, so employees are using this device to make
customers happy but “forgetting” to tell the customer about the obligation it
places upon them. I get a couple of
calls per week from people who actually read the letter explaining the change
and say it is not what they wanted, so if a couple per week actually read their
mail then I know this is a rampant problem that the company needs to fix, or
may choose to ignore because they are after all getting what they want, more
customers obligated to pay them money each month.
Whatever happened to providing a great service that people
are willing to pay for and not trying to squeeze your customers for every penny
you possibly can. That most certainly
isn’t the world we are currently living in and I doubt it will go back to that
any time soon. The moral of this short
story is read your mail because it could cost you if you don’t. This is only the beginning of my concerns so
stay tuned to this website and find out the many more ways that working for a
large corporation just absolutely blows.
And of course we will tell great stories about working in a call
center. If you have stories of your own
that you would like to share then please feel free to submit them we will be
happy to share them with everyone on this website.
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