Sprint's "Nucking Futs" "Jessica" Fired
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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Comments:
In the future, when all women are named Jessica, I wonder what name all men will get? I hope it's not Trent.
See, there it is again. Just like that recent story where a telephone representative got a little crazy: Sprint brands its own name all over services provided by third parties (call center companies, or in this case, InQ), even going so far as to prevent them from admitting that they work for a third party, but the moment one of those people fucks up, it's "Whoa, that was someone at some other company, don't look at us." And people wonder why third party contract support is so stressful; none of the kudos, all of the blame.
The recently liberated "Jessica" should consider a career in the priesthood.
That'd be the best confessional EVER.
Does anyone else find it strange that EVERYONE is called Jessica? Even the guys? I mean, is it really that much harder to have unique names (or at least more than 1)?
@Beerad: Lincoln.
I wonder how many commenters will demand to see more "proof" that this really did occur.
why do they use stage names? I have used chat support, and by remembering the name of the person i was talking, was able to reconnect with them by asking to be transfered. Lame.
A warning would have been sufficient, firing is a little harsh.
Maybe he was bitter that he had to call himself "Jessica" all day.
I'm not sure if I believe that this person actually works for the Sprint CS outsourcer. It is way too non-PRy.
@EyeHeartPie: I'm sure it has something to do with the psychological perception of the name. They probably researched it and found that people respond favorably to the name. It certainly sounds friendlier and more helpful than "Marge" or "Joe", it has a sweet, friendly, innocent connotation. That probably carries over to customer perception and may even help to calm irate customers (less likely to lay into a sweet innocent Jessica than other names).
What about the fact that Sprint's reps don't know the most basic things about the business?
That's one reason right there. It also inhibits debt harrassers from phoning up the call center.
They may not be GOOD reasons, but meh.
They probably researched it and found that people respond favorably to the name.
Alba?
Biel?
Rabbit?
Simpson?
You may have a point.
It's good to know that Sprint cares enough to outsource Instant Messaging agents, give them "zero access to anything," and name them all Jessica, thus making it very difficult to hold reps accountable except by painstakingly going through transcripts by hand.
And really - by hand? Shouldn't these sessions be searchable?
This sounds like a very helpful resource for customers.
@Buran:
That has more to do with Sprint itself than the outside agency.
They aren't paid to know, and they aren't even remotely paid well enough to look it up on their own time.
As someone once put it to me: "Just do your job the way they tell you to do it, and don't stick your head up."
Of course, that argument ALWAYS leads to Godwin.
@EyeHeartPie: So, is it the case that not everyone that have a girl's name on the internet are actually girls?
Oh Lord, what have I done?
Strange conversation.
Also, I don't understand the last paragraph that Jessica is typing.
"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!"
Where are all the people who cried "Photoshop!" when this story was first posted?
Where in that screenshot did it say it was a Friday at 5:17 PM?
benpopken: Is that common, razzing customers?
Jessica: no are you nucking futs?
@RvLeshrac: Why is that?
And I would think that they would be paid to answer customer questions and perform support. You can't do that by making up answers on the fly.
A "ha" for someone getting canned seems harsh. It's one thing to strive for fairness, another to be overly vindictive and insensitive.
Dealing with job loss, even when deserved, sucks.
I recently was on a chat session in an effort to discuss my billing and once my questions amounted to requiring some research, they 'hung up' on me. ah well... go sprint....
@Beerad
Jessie?
@Crumbles
The second picture shows their desktop with the clock in the upper right hand corner.
@pmathews: That's just a shorted version of 'Jessica'.
Were you looking for 'Jesse'? A la: Jesse James, Jesse Jackson, Jesse Owens, Jesse Ventura, etc.
@dwarf74: Do you know how many times "nucking futs" is legitimately used in a chat session? Searching would be fruitless.
@NightSteel: Our Gas provider outsourced some customer contact to a third party. I got this crazy call on my cel phone that involved this woman claiming to be from our gas utility and then proceeded to go into an insane hostile rant at me. I finally just cut the call and hung up. When I got home I called the main CS line and got someone at the company who admitted that it really was a third party call center working FOR them. He profusely apologized and fixed the minor problem for me and swore they would never be calling me again. Companies don't fully realize the kind of bad blood some of these third party services can create for their company.
Can I call bullshit on this?
@Peeved Guy
Darn it. I knew it didn't look right.
Glad they jumped on this but that there's still a gaping security hole on their website.
I, for one, welcome our new Jessica and John Mayer Overlords.
Are these overlords, or underdogs? And can you tell the difference, these days?
Got a whole lot of bitter overlords out there whose jobs got outsourced, clinging to their telephones and keyboards...
So how did the fired "Jessica's" carpool mates get home that day?
im surprised this turned out to be a real story. i figured someone doctored the original photo of the chat transcript and made it up. i couldnt believe anyone at a chat center would ever write something like that, seemed too ridiculous to believe.
NightSteel: Yeah, and I also found it strange that they're called "support" but they don't have access to any more information than the customer does themselves.
Did anyone else catch that? They can't actually do ANYTHING for you that you can't do yourself. Amazing...
Chat is essentially useless, I think. I hit the chat icon for my cable company about an outage and the "guy" told me they were aware of the problem and had technicians on site, but three separate people told me when I called that there was no report and no one had been dispatched.
Sometimes I forget these services are outsourced. It's cool to see the "inside" once in a while.