Jessica: I work for the company that hires the chat agents for sprint. I just wanted to let you know that after you guys posted “Sprint To Customer: “Are You Nucking Futs?”“, the supervisors found the person and they have been fired. Thanks for the heads up! there’s no way it would have ever been found.
benpopken: Ha, sweet, which company is that?
Jessica: It’s called InQ. “Jessica” (we’re all “Jessica”) is a real person, every time. no auto-responses, just scripts. But that person just was really new and apparently didn’t “get it”. I’ve been working there for about 6 months, and that’s the first time I’ve seen something like that.
benpopken: How did the company track down which “Jessica” it was?
Jessica: By hand, going through chats that took place on the last 2 fridays around 517pm (like the screen cap showed.)
benpopken: How was the matter addressed internally? Was there an announcement?
Jessica: It wasn’t necessary, once a single person knew it spread like crazy to all the departments. But the general concensus around the office was “oh my god, what were they thinking??” There’s a zero tolerance policy for anything like that. So basically the person was just walked out the next day. no one would have known who it was, but he gave some people a carpool ride, so process of elimination…
Jessica: I don’t know if sprint corporate has even commented on it to inq yet, if so, they didn’t tell us. but apparently he was fired before sprint said anything or saw it on your site.
benpopken: Is that common, razzing customers?
Jessica: Not at all. We deal with some of the angriest and craziest sprint customers, too, and we have like zero access to anything. So we’re sitting there trying to help them, but we cant see their account or change anything, etc. All we really have is sprint.com to help us, which isn’t much.
benpopken: That must make it difficult at times
Jessica: It is, but there’s no excuse for what that kid pulled. None of us ever do anything like that, and we try our best to assist people when we can. I’m a sprint customer, too, so i know it can be like the worst thing in the world sometimes, but that guy was waaay out of line saying that, and on a whole, I think that doesn’t reflect our service. Thanks for the tip, again, the timely notice of that might have saved all our jobs. Again, my name is Jessica. Thank you for visiting Sprint.com today!
PREVIOUSLY: Sprint To Customer: “Are You Nucking Futs?”
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We’re all Jessica (line 6 from the start of article)… again, my name is Jessica (2nd line from the end). maybe sprint should change their name to Jessica!
@m4ximusprim3: My friends call me Jessie. You may call me Ray.
@Mr. Gunn: I use the “chat” feature when I’m pretty sure the info I want is on the website but I’m too lazy to look for it myself. Actually trying to get any type of assistance, though, I agree. Useless.
Accountability is a great motivator. The moron though his/her comments wouldn’t be noticed, the Sears morons didn’t shift themselves until Citibank executives called them, etc.
Why is there almost universally rude and bad “service” from companies, and why do the executives not pay attention and avail themselves to customers until forced to?
Hey, “Jessica”: *Maybe* there are “crazy customers” because companies made them that way from consistently bad service.
When I worked for the Kerry campaign, we always had women answer the public phone at the national headquarters and the collective name was “Vivian.”
One time when I was Vivian I talked to a woman for a half hour about how the aliens were really in charge and George W. Bush and John Kerry were secretly brothers.
Obviously, she had been the one to bring the subject up.
“ZOMGZ, that chat window was shopped!!!1 No one could be that stupid!”
Wait… this was a real occurrence? Oh, never mind, then. Maybe people are that stupid.
Talk about cognitive dissonance! You’re chatting with someone who sounds human and then they end the chat with the usual CSR robotic spiel:
If this were a phone conversation that would be spoken in a Dalek voice or something.
@lemur: This was just a little joke with no malice. To get a “Ha, sweet” out of someone losing their meager livelihood over a stupid tiny prank is pretty cruel. And if Ben wants this place to continue to be a champion for consumer fairness, he needs to stick to the high road.
@Beerad: Hey whats wrong with Trent? Thats my name!
(it really is my name, but I’m just pretending that I care…)
@failurate: doh! click wrong reply to…
@failurate:
His job was to help people. He lost his job because he wasn’t doing his job, i.e. helping people.
That’s like going to a mechanic and asking him to change your tires, and he calls you names and swears at you. You think that guy wouldn’t get fired?
Uhh, way out of line? I dunno. Seems to me to be a sort of playful comment. Then again, I talk like a sailor.
Well if the image was shopped, the transcript could be fake too.
@EyeHeartPie: I am not saying he didn’t deserve to lose his job, but what I am saying is, don’t kick a man who is down.
We don’t know the guy’s story. He could have hated this job or not taken it seriously. Or, he could just be someone who made a very dumb mistake, typed up something that he thought was funny, then pressed enter instead of delete.
And the event you are describing (irate mechanic) is way out of proportion to the event that actually happened (snarky keyboard jockey).
Sprint chat should take a look at what Linksys does with their chat. I had to use it last night for tech support and I had someone who had a first and last name (which was an unusual name, not like Jessica Smith or whatever) and an ID number. The person was obviously copying and pasting from a script, which I don’t mind because I’m sure the problem I was having was pretty routine. However, at the end when my issue was solved they broke script and actually acted like a real person by saying typing a smiley face
which I thought was a nice touch. I’m sure some might find it unprofessional, but I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t have done it if I sounded uptight in my chat.
@dwarf74: Yeah, I find it hard to believe there isn’t some quality mechanism behind the works keeping tabs on every chat window’s average response time… but, maybe not.
has anyone entertained the idea that the person who did that wanted to leave? i’ve seen some pretty crazy last days in my short time in professional america.
For the record, I said it didn’t looked like it was photoshopped, glad the guy got fired.
Why not just put “Customer Service Rep” or “Representive” for the name?
Maybe the Jessicas could have different last names, like all the aliens named “John” in the movie “Buckaroo Banzai”. Then you would have : Jessica Ya ya, Jessica ManyJessicas Jessica BigBoote, etc.
Ah, Sorry…
Thank you “Jessica”. Just proves what I have always thought…. the name provided to customers is false yet we are “required” to divulge our private and confidential information.
From now on my name is Red Blueberry.
@nffcnnr: They asked one of the other Jessicas for a ride.
@Buran:
They aren’t paid to “provide support” and “answer customer questions,” they’re paid to sell the service and/or keep customers out of the normal phone queue.
And the Godwin thing… the argument boils down to “Just follow orders.”
Why do they have to be called Jessica? I don’t understand that…
So wait. Jessica was a dude? That’s nucking futs!
Jessica is also a very crafty PR person.
Some here have suggested Jessica’s post is an exercise in Sprint PR.
I doubt it. This isn’t exactly on message:
“I’m a sprint customer, too, so i know it can be like the worst thing in the world sometimes”
To those sad about “Jessica’s” firing: in addition to his rudeness, he turned out to have given her the wrong answer. The bastard deserved the heave-ho.
What’s the point in ending with “My name is Jessica” after explaining that everybody’s ‘name’ there is “Jessica”?
@NightSteel:
Sorry to break it to you man, but EVERY telecommunications company in America outsources everything they can: installers, call centers, CSR’s, application development, sometimes even management (anybody know what Accenture is?).
@Boy Howdy: AHHH HAHAHAHAHAHSAHAHAH oh I pooped a little.
@Edward Lionheart: exactly. place yourself in a inq executive’s shoes for a minute: you run a big company, one of your dumbass employees calls a customer ‘fucking nuts’ (cuz that’s what he was saying geez) and you’re NOT gonna fire him? puhleeze.
@banmojo: I would have definitely let the guy go. But that doesn’t change the fact that I believe “Ha, sweet…” is still an inappropriate response and grossly smug from a Consumerist blogger.
To answer some of the questions above.
The final line – …Jessica…thanks for using Sprint… was the automatically applied closing from the chat system.
inQ is a sales assistance company that is on-line for Sprint to provide detailed information about new plans and handsets to help the customer find the info faster.
The answer given by the nucking futs Jessica was totally wrong.
In talking elsewhere with one of the “Jessicas” about their service, I found this was a legit event, and the company (inQ) took steps to fix it before getting a call from Sprint – they want to keep their contract.
@Beerad: “Beverly”.
@Mr. Gunn: It’s not strange at all. For many years, if you called Samsung Cust Service on a weekend, you were talking to someone who not only didn’t have access to Samsung’s CS files, but wasn’t trained on the products and had to wing it with what could be found on Samsung’s website, or a shelf of owner’s manuals, none of which were for models less than five years old, and if that didn’t provide the answer to call back monday. It took the Samsung CS people about five years to figure out they were outsourcing weekend CS to another company without providing them any support whatever.
Sprint continues to have severe problems with customer service and billing. Sprint needs to fire some, not all, employees, managers, quality assurance people. Sprint corporate and out-sourced call centers will fire an employee for taking a sick child to the hospital, then, keep someone like “Jessica” around until the complaint is made public enough to embarrass the company.
@annswers: They could be cruising for a lawsuit….my call center company is pretty liberal about FMLA issues. There was a girl that used it liberally in my account, she was ultimately fired because she told them she needed to leave work as “her child was having an asthma attack and needed to go to the hospital” but was found shortly afterward having sex with a man…who was not her husband…in the passenger seat of a car in a parking lot nearby.