Archive for June, 2010
The View From the Bottom: What you’re working against already
Working at the telephone tech support level of IT, actual expertise in technology was considered mostly irrelevant by the numerous middle-managers above. We on the phones deal with the same set of five to ten problems, for fifty-five calls (per person) per day. When we receive a problem that isn’t one of those five to ten, there is an unspoken expectation that we send your problem up to the next tier of support, a group that doesn’t spend their days answering phones. This is never explicitly stated in our job description of course, but is evidenced in the expectations of our “stats.”
Our “telephone” is a headset (the shackle) plugged into a computer, with a piece of software on-screen used to accept or disconnect a call, dial a number, or take a break. That software tracks everything we do including breaks. At the end of every week an e-mail is sent to each of us with a breakdown of our statistics which generates a score that is tracked against everyone else’s score. At the end of the quarter the top three scorers from the quarter win a fifty dollar Best Buy gift card, a free dinner at Chili’s, or songs from the iTunes music store. Promotions (when there actually are promotions available) are ordinarily dolled out to those quarterly winners. What this means is that someone who is going to excel in the job spends as little time as possible with each customer, transfers people the fastest, writes reports for the calls that need it the least (as those reports are the fastest to write), and takes the fewest number of breaks. It’s a system that emphasizes quantity over quality.
