Originally posted by: Horus
Originally posted by: PrinceofWands
You have to understand that it usually has NOTHING to do with the technicians, and EVERYTHING to do with the company. As with 99% of everything in the world, it's all about money for the company, and not about helping customers.
Technicians are required to say and do exactly what the company wants, within the time they want, or they lose their jobs. It's all scripted, timed, and monitored.
And you're an idiot. It's not scripted.
I work tech support for a major telecom company in Ontario. It can't be scripted. There's procedures to follow, sure. And if our call-times are not completely up to snuff, oh well. As long as you're not taking 20 minutes to solve a 2 minute problem.
And I worked tier II for a couple years for @Home, thru the breakup into individual providers. Over that time I worked for Cox, Comcast, Charter, Rogers, AT@T, and a few others (we were under contract to all of them). At the time it was all routed thru Stream (I personally was in the Beaverton office), but each individual provider stuck us with different requirements of what we would say and do with their customers.
Our metrics we had to meet were insane, and chief among them was time. Get them off in a few minutes. If you hadn't reached a solution coming up on your time cutoff then tell them you'd repush the modems and if they still had trouble the next day they could call back.
Of course, there was usually a 'quality assurance agent' or mentor or supervisor listening in. You'd get up around 7 minutes on a call and they'd beep in:
"Hey, you having trouble?"
"No, I think we've got it figured out, just gonna take some time with all the reboots and stuff."
"Nah, just repush and let em go."
"But that's not the issue, and won't do anything."
"The call is too long, it's probably something they did anyway, so repush."
Then you get written up for not meeting your time requirements AND the customer would call back and complain about you so you'd get written up for not helping the customer. It got so bad that the floor supervisors REQUIRED us to stop using greetings and to drive the customer thru preset diagnostics, regardless of the problems. Meanwhile the individual providers required specific greetings and told us to work with the customers thru their issues. So, if you gave a greeting your supervisor would write you up for wasting time, but if you didn't give the greeting and the provider audited the call or if the customer complained you were written up for not following the contract requirements.
We were given pretty specific scripted statements. There were no outages, there were 'unscheduled maintenances for performance enhancement'. So when the cheap parts that the company used (or the cheap labor) dropped someones node it was actually something good for the customer.There were at least dozens of canned responses we were REQUIRED to give to specific questions. Most of them weren't just misinformation, they were outright lies intended to guard the companies bottom line.
Just as I was leaving the focus shifted slightly away from purely time, and more to: 'It's always the customers fault, not the service'. No matter what was actually going on we were to work from the standpoint that the problem existed within the customers home...bad wiring, interference, bad computer, software issues...the sop was to find ANY excuse why it wasn't our problem and get them off the phone for it.
It was the biggest joke on the planet, designed ENTIRELY around corporate profits, fully scripted and controlled, and had NOTHING to do with customer service.
Just because you happen to work somewhere that might care a little about the customers is no reason to assume that's true of the rest of corporate America.
So FVCK you you ignorant worthless little pr!ck!!!
I'm sick and tired of ignorant butt munches like you telling me I don't have a clue about what I've spent my life doing. Ignorant bastard. Why don't you come read some of my 'mementos' from that glorious job and then tell me to my face how my company worked.
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