EXCELLENT advice, Fluiddruid. I’ve had customers I’ve tried to go the extra mile for screw me over as soon as I didn’t go a mile and an inch. It’s easier when you really ARE a drone and have no power. You do what you are told, deny the unreasonable requests, and then the manager goes against everything you told the customer. It’s frustrating at first, but you learn the roles each of you play - I was the “no” guy, and the manager was the “yes” man. I’m supposed to turn away as many unreasonable requests as I can. Granted, this just rewards the customer and he pitches an even bigger fit the next time he’s unhappy, but that wasn’t my problem.
The real problems come when you rise up a bit, you have some power, and then have to weigh what management *says *with what they really want.
I once worked for a company like this. Sales people were ranked by total sales dollars, not by profit. So if we’d paid $100 per widget, and salesman A sells 10 of them at $101 each, he has actually made the company $10. If salesman B sells 2 at $150 each, he’s made $100.
But since $1010 is greater than $300, salesman A wins the Bahamas trip for making 1/10th as much money for the company. Drove me nuts. (No, I wasn’t a salesman, but I witnessed the idiocy.)
Well, then we get “Agent of the Quarter” awards where an agent gets a prize worth about $50. Four agents total. Then the top Supervisor gets a prize worth about $1000. I don’t think they’ve quite grasped that this actually hurts morale. They’re too busy putting on their little show.
Thanks for all the kind words. I guess that soul crushing 4 years in a call center was good for something. (Three years as a low-level supervisor.)
Definitely. I had to establish stealthier tactics. One manager was so inconsistent and arbitrary – and knew it – that I would email her about everything. She’s usually insist that I come talk to her about it, and never respond to the email. I’d then email her a followup with everything we talked about and invite her to correct me if it was wrong, “just to avoid further confusion”. I still used the Good Employee strategy so she couldn’t really be overtly mad.
This was the same manager who insisted I meet with all employees in the department to go over a new policy by a certain time (two hours from now). We had about 100 employees. This was to be a 10-15 minute meeting. Also, our average handle time was 15 minutes, so you figure it’s going to take a few minutes to grab people if you don’t want overlap.
I said, “Service levels are pretty poor right now, are you sure you want me to pull groups of people off the phone?”
Manager: “No, pull them off individually.”
Me: “Okay, so we can get them done over the next few days, then.”
Manager: “No, I said today by 3!”
Me: “And you mean the whole department, not just my team?”
Manager: “Yes!”
Me: “Do I have to go over it in detail or can I just give them the memo and tell them the gist of it?”
Manager: “Just do what I said before, the 15 minute meetings.”
Me: “… I cannot do 100 individual fifteen minute meetings in two hours.”
Manager: “Just make it happen.”
Me: “Hang on a second. <checks service levels, sees a lot of agents waiting for calls> We’re looking better. I’ll just pull groups off and make it go faster.”
Manager: “Fine, whatever.”
She wasn’t dumb, she just wanted to set me up as a scapegoat for all of her failings. She did this to lots of people. I just wasn’t about to be blamed for her lack of leadership.
Shit rolls downhill to a certain extent but managers that have absolutely no loyalty to their subordinates piss me off to a huge degree. Every time an upper manager or the client would bitch, she’d find a way to try to blame somebody else. Thus, I learned it’s not important what work you do or what you contribute, but how well you can cover your ass (at least when you’re in such backward environments). I knew my shit, but as soon as the heat was on the poor manager, it’d quickly become my problem. I had to go through the documentation process with a few of my most difficult managers (I usually had a new manager every 2-3 months, it was that bad for turnover). Once they learned that I kept EVERY email they sent, and I have a very good memory about policy decisions, they’d find a new mule to beat on.
Amen. The only place where I was retaliated against for going to a manager was the aforementioned call center which had a corporation-wide open door policy. I knew I was falling on my sword, but I didn’t care at that point. I figured that retaliation would be really hard to prove and nobody’d protect me unless it was incredibly obvious and overt. I was right.
If a real open door policy exists, you generally know it. I’d bring anything to my current manager and he’s never mentioned any policy. We’ve developed an atmosphere of trust and loyalty. Policies don’t do that.
Happily, I’ve never had to do the job you do. But I have done demos at trade shows, often in a demo room where it is a bunch of customers and potential customers and you. Many of these people spout off suggestions for the tool that make about as much sense as what your customer was saying. The best response I found was to say that it was an interesting idea which would be considered. It’s unlikely they’ll get you even if they do call back.
In my experience, managers with a real open door policy don’t need it, because they wander around, find out what is going on, and thus allow people to express their frustration without having to go to their offices.
Oh, God. Morale. I have never seen more absolutely insane tactics used in business as those that were intended to inspire morale. They nearly always had the exact opposite effect.
Ultimately, the problem was that while the company wanted to improve morale, they also didn’t want to solve any of the huge problems that created the morale problem. I was literally told by one upper level manager, “Look, we’ll always have high turnover, but we’ll save X dollars if we can just convince people to stay one month longer. We need to find ways to do that without increased costs.”
Our turnover rate was about 300%. That means, on the average, a particular position would be filled three times every year. Of course, this was not to have any impact on the quality of calls (sure), their length (yeah right) and the professionalism of employees (you bet). The staggering costs of interviewing, training, and orienting these employees was obviously a concern, so we were given about $50 a month to deal with the morale problem.
$50 a month. For a department of over a hundred people. When we were spending millions a year on turnover costs. We had a staff of about eight full time recruiters from a few temp agencies that were on site at our building (of about 1,000), and eventually our own full time recruiter. Yes, call centers are heavy on recruitment but none of them in the area have that sort of turnover unless they do telemarketing. It’s insane.
Anyway, so we used to spend hours arguing about how to spend our $50. My suggestion was to do an employee of the month and give them a $50 gift card. However that wouldn’t “spread it around” enough.
Some things we actually did (no, I am not joking):
An ice cream social. On your unpaid lunchbreak, you could stop in for a single scoop of generic ice cream. No seconds.
Each team got to pick a child’s craft kit from Oriental Trader and work together on it when it was slow.
We bought a helium tank and gave balloons to top performers on several occasions (took us a few months to pay off the cost of the tank).
One upper manager forced, on pain of firing, the entire supervisory staff to go to the top performer of the month’s desk and play kazoos. Loudly. Every month for about six months. In a call center!!
(I swear I had nothing to do with this one!) All employees were told not to bring their lunches on X day, as the company had it covered. It turns out that this meant baloney sandwiches for everyone. You could have two slices of generic white bread, one slice of baloney, and either ketchup or mustard. You also got a can of generic soda. No vegetarian option, no seconds, no chips, nothing else. We nearly had a riot on our hands that day.
The most popular thing was handing out $5 gas cards for good performance, with two issues: 1) they were reported for tax purposes so you really only got a buck or two and 2) they were given out seemingly randomly, including to people who were known to be very poor employees.
For what it’s worth, supervisors were never eligible for any of these things or really any kind of performance incentive.
Oh, and once we received around ten thousand dollars from a client to reward our employees, including $1,000 for one particular employee who was known to do a really good job. The employee never received the money (never even knew about it) and the company never gave out anything. We discussed how to spend the money, then it was vapor, and the managers insisted we’d never discussed it. I guess the company kept it.
I can be fairly objective when I say that people HAVE to be loud, obnoxious and disrespectful to get anywhere with a customer support person.
Just like the OP said, they are trained to say no. It costs the company money to fix issues.
We, as a people, are being trained, daily, to be loud, rude and obnoxious to get a desired result.
I’d blame those same corporate “management types” but for entirely different reasons.
If you have a problem that you can accommodate with little hassle, fix said issue. Things in the customer service industry might change for the better. instead, we are being force fed “NO” UNTIL we get to talk to a “supervisor”
We have a formal ‘escalate’ system. Basically, I can at anytime chose to escalate a problem (say with a client) or the client themselves can escalate (basically asking to speak with a higher up). We actually inform him/her about the escalate system and why we are doing it (if it is us escalating). It is all very above board and transparent.
A higher up will look at it and talk with me, then talk with the client separately then render a decision. If it is against the client then the higher up takes the heat. If the higher up decides to bend to the client then informs me…hey, that is fine because it is done coolly and professionally and gives me the authority to do the clients request over internal barriers. It hasn’t, to my experience and knowledge, been a very negative experience even when the higher up gives suggestions on better ways to handle it.
I don’t love my company. It isn’t warm and fuzzy by a long shot…but DAMN…they sure do some things right!
I’m sure many lesser companies don’t do this because it requires the higher up to actually…well…manage and make decisions.
Even in my oldness and growing cynicism…I fell for something like this.
Every year my company has a trip to a Caribbean Island for people that go above and beyond the call of duty.
Many years ago, when I first started, we were a much smaller company. However, my boss quit…and so did EVERY OTHER PERSON IN MY AREA. I was the only one left. Now, I was not wet-behind-the-ears and had substantial experience but I was NOT by bosses calibre.
We had an emergency meeting and upper management basically told me to do what I could and pass on projects that I couldn’t do because of time restraints onto another person and they would get outside resources to do it.
For 6 months it was just ME…and I did EVERY PROJECT but 1. They were expecting more than half to be outsourced. I was going through a divorce at the time and so actually enjoyed doing this.
I even took over my bosses responsibilities…went to client meetings, sales calls etc. I did fine. It really boosted my confidence realizing that I could do all these things my boss had done successfully and with praise.
So…
Comes the time of the Caribbean island annoucing time…I just ASSUMED I would be going. I mean…C’MON…how could I NOT be going? I even bought some clothes for the trip :).
The announcement…you guessed it…I wasn’t on it.
Then I looked at the list seriously for the first time…it was ALL upper management with the exception of 1 token drone…and that token drone - I suspect she was suspected of sleeping with one of the execs (considering they got married a few years later)
Damn I felt stupid…to be taken in on what was essentially a upper exec perk masqueraded as an entire company benefit :(.
{not that I did it for the trip…I would have worked hard anyway…but it was still dissappointing}
Wow, this sounds eerily familiar to a company I used to work for and I believe we had a center in Iowa. Does the company name sound like a description for a small river?
Even if it’s not, I feel your pain, quite literally.
I was, as a manager, volunteered as part of a group to wear a dress (I’m a guy) if our employees made some inconsequential goal or other. When I told management that I wasn’t interested in cross-dressing for morale purposes, I was chastised for not being a “team” player and advised that if I didn’t do it, it wouldn’t look good on my review that year.
Getting laid off from there was the best thing that ever happened to me…
Well Hell, even when I was in IT, I remember some private gathering at someone’s home where the 3 supervisors attempted to force the other four of us (all non-supervisors) to play hop-scotch for their amusement.
Didn’t go over well when I refused to participate. Same “not a team player” bullshit.
The worst part, as a manager, was when the staff would say “No, sorry, our policy says we can’t just give you a new $500 widget”, so the customer would throw a wobbly and demand to speak to someone in charge. So either myself or the store manager would again, politely, say “Look, I’m sorry, but we cannot just give you another $500 widget because the one you’ve had for six months (and looks suspiciously like it’s been dropped a lot in that time) doesn’t work. We’re happy to send yours away for repair at no charge, but we can’t just replace it. You know how it is.” Even as we’d be doing this, we’d be thinking of the memo that came through the previous week from Head Office saying UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES AT ALL, EVER, ARE STAFF TO EXCHANGE THIS WIDGET. THE SECRETARY-GENERAL OF THE UNITED NATIONS HIMSELF COULD COME IN WANTING AN EXCHANGE AND YOU’D HAVE TO TELL HIM THAT THE ITEM NEEDS TO GO TO THE SERVICE CENTRE IN MELBOURNE FOR REPAIR. ANY STAFF FOUND EXCHANGING THESE WIDGETS WILL BE IN A LOT OF TROUBLE AND SHOULD PROBABLY START LOOKING FOR ANOTHER JOB, THAT’S HOW SERIOUS THIS IS.
And the customer would ring Head Office and complain, and then we’d get our Area Manager calling us up and bollocking us for pissing off a customer, then ordering us to exchange the Widget (in direct violation of the company’s cast-iron policy), and then- when the Widget was invariably found to have been dropped by the customer and the manufacturer wouldn’t honour the warranty on it- the store would be out for the $350+ cost of the Widget.
And then the company would wonder why all its staff kept quitting.
Well, my main point is that companies that tell their sales people to sacrifice sales revenues in favor of holding the line on price are usually liars.
As for your point, those cases you are getting are an exception to the rule, and I am sure that’s why they come to you for redress. That said, I remember having a conversation with a former sales manager at my company who said that when he took over, he fired all the salesmen except one, and hired an entirely new sales team at half their pay.
Again, he is a FORMER sales manager.
I’m sure there’s also a lot of age discrimination that takes place as well. This is especially true in companies that get new sales managers who think that the top level salespeople are old, and are sitting around collecting commissions from a large book of existing clients, and not growing their territory (which is sometimes true).
Just out of curiosity, how successful are those complaints?
Seems you didn’t learn any lesson at all. If the customer doesn’t like your options, and your attitude, he should be allowed to reach a supervisor. He can always reach one the hard way, starting from the personnel office, so don’t think you can dodge him forever.
I used to work for Lucent Technologies back in the 90’s as a dedicated customer service rep for some very high end customers like Mercedes-Benz and CTI. My job was basically to see to their daily needs, and get them to pay their monthly bills on time. I was very good at it, and my clients loved me.
I found another job when I got a bad review for being too “customer focused”.
As opposed to what? It doesn’t sound like you were in collections or something else where sympathy for the customer would be an obstacle?