Someone posted this in the comments yesterday. Great story, and it's dead on with my 2-year experience in a an outsource call center doing tech support for Gateway and Dell.

As a professional helpdesk agent for some years now... most of this stuff is pretty spot on.

From working at Dell, I can tell you its all True.

My customer service working experience was very similar. A lot of us installed "rear view" mirrors because management would like to stand behind us to catch us slacking. All idle time is monitored. Bathroom breaks are frowned upon, especially going #2 outside of your unpaid lunch break. That is if you even got a lunch break due to call volumes. I also often got in trouble for spending too much time helping customers. And this is at a good call center with 80% and up customer satisfaction.

@SynMonger: Yeah, it was Burt Reynolds. No wait, he changed his name to Turd Ferguson. It's funny, just like his big hat.

[consumerist.com]

Of AT&T this is 100% true. You get 7 minutes a day to use for bathroom breaks, that's 7 minutes for a 9 hour day. You get two 15 minute breaks of course and an hour lunch. Your idle time is watched, you're allowed up to 3 minutes between calls to follow up and finish notating the call, and then it's on to the next one. Anymore, the calls are constantly back to back all day, everyday, so after 20 or so tech support calls, your brain kind of turns in to mush.

I never worked as a CSR, but I was a hated telemarketer for a magazine sales company. They did monitor our time away from the phone and gave us 5 minutes of "pause time" every day. If you went over at all they would cut your bonus by 10%, which is no joke considering your "bonus" is all you get paid.

I know a good kid that worked there who lost $400 once just because he was 10 seconds over on his pause time. Of course the way it worked, the room manager was on his own PNL and whatever they cut from your pay went in their pocket. Great system.

The part about extra-sensitive phones that can sense denim worn made me crack up. Oh god, it sounds like one of those laugh-to-keep-from-crying deals.

I had a friend who did telemarketing for about five minutes in college. It sounded like a cult, kind of like call centers do. He got cotton candy and popcorn if he made a sale. I am convinced there was some sort of mind-altering substance in that popcorn that made you more and more of a drone everytime you ate it.

another help-desker chiming in--this is all very true. i work at an internal help desk, so i don't help non-employees (of the company i work for), but it's still most of the same crap.

everything we do is monitored. we get 45 seconds after each call to finish up the call record, going over is frowned upon and if you go over too often you get a talking to.

luckily we're not banned from reading books!

Call centers are not alone on this issue either. Your local stores also. Customers always call for support because they cant reach call centers or cant find the 1800 number buried in the fine print. If customers just took the time to read the instructions or do a little research on the web, alot of the answers have been answered. But instead they call stores and tie up alot of time asking questions or ask for walkthru's, with the statement I bought it there so you have to support it!! This is why you have a hard time getting someone to pickup the phone in stores. Other reasons for lack of phone support, Can you check this stock level and rattle of several stock numbers. I need memory for my computer what do I need? I understand not everyone is tech savy and needs help, but on the other end ( in the stores) you have customers in the building that you are helping sometimes 2 or 3 deep and the phone is ringing of the hook, you got management riding your ass to pickup the phone because they cant answer questions either, they just know how to yell when you dont pickup the phone. Ive seen some employees at a register answer the phone and speaking to a customer, ringing a customer out of there purchase, and a manager yell at them because they did not thank the customer at the register for there purchase and that the phone was ringing with another call. Are you still wondering why you get the run around on the phone when you call now.

@AutoTuneShouldBeACrime_GitEmSteveDave:

"Yeah, that's right. Turd Ferguson. It's a funny name."

This article explained every called i've ever had with tech support. If Chris was directed to this by my comment, I'm glad I could contribute.

I am sure this is all true....but I also have to think of the MASS miscommunication that goes on between the call center person and a person who has no idea about a computer.

It is very hard to single out the problem when the person does not know the correct language, parts of the computer, or what they even did to get the results that they have.

Its true of ATT. They finally let us play games on the devices they gave us thoug@DevoAlmighty: Same here I'm in the data support. Constant changing of the rules and the whole quality thing where they pick little details out and make you use their slow website to look up solutions for problems even if you know off the top of your head. Constantly adding more rules and policies but keep lowering the time for how long your calls can take.

@LegoMan322:

The thing about it is, after awhile you learn what the non-computer folks mean.

Such as:

Customer: "I can't do e-mail!"
What they mean: "My network card isn't being recognized, can you try reinstalling the driver, and have me reseat it, please?"

@SynMonger:

Another example:

Customer: My foot pedal won't work!

I'll let everyone ponder on it, and post back what this meant later.

I believe this is true, but it still doesn't excuse the fact that for a customer, dealing with a call center is often as painful as getting a root canal. If the job of the person on the other end of the phone is to give me the run around and avoid anything else, then job well done. Otherwise, the suckiness of their job conditions don't offset the suckiness of my interaction with their company.

I'm trying to decide if this would be worse or better than my job as an emergency dispatcher.

@SynMonger: Exactly but a 18 yr old CS rep might not understand why this person does not understand. While I was in that kind of service....it took a decent amount of time for me to understand they have no clue what they are talking about.

Yes it's all true. I used to work for Stream International here in Canada for 5 years in HP desktop, notebook and jet direct departments. I am now diagnosed with PTSD and the nightmares won't go away. I WANT A NEW MOUSE!!!!!!

So if I had bad Chinese food the night before, and I need to take a porcelain cruse for about 20-30 minutes, I'd get fired huh?

Not worth workin' there.

What I don't get is why these "metrics" get applied so mindlessly. I mean, it would seem obvious to me that just looking at averages over a short time period is a pretty poor way of judging effectiveness (even if I thought it were true that fast call handle times equals employee effectiveness, which I really don't). But they should at least look at things like the variance in call times in order to determine the likelihood that a particular agent just got "unlucky" that day and by random chance got some calls that took longer to handle. More sophisticated statistics could make these things a bit less retarded.

But ultimately, I don't think that simple metrics necessarily work from the customer's perspective. They might save the company money in the short term if the company doesn't care about customer satisfaction, but you're ultimately going to probably get bad results by using something as simplistic as time on the phone to judge how good an employee is.

@Nicolai Hilckmann: Always a classic!

@SynMonger:

means: My sewing machine isn't plugged in, please direct back to the chair in front of my computer.

@LegoMan322: I be it's even harder when neither the call person NOR the person on the line know these things. It seems that too many companies simply aren't willing to pay to hire reasonably trained/qualified staff, and rely on scripts entirely. That's fine as long as there is a backup tier for when someone with a real problem that isn't easily solved calls in, but it seems that companies (I assume out of cheapness) are getting more and more reluctant even to shunt the hard cases to competent techs (I assume because the first tier "techs" have a metric that says they are performing poorly if they pass too many calls up the chain).

I worked helpdesk tech support for 2 years, but luckily my experience was only for internal employees. They can't yell at ya or bosses clash...I never had any real problems with it. There was around 3 to 5 thousand people that could have called in, but from my experience there was really only 500 or so that called in regularly. The job got boring after 12 months and I anxiously awaited a new job.

@Raekwon: Luckily I work for a company that supports other companies instead of run of the mill users

This provides for a more Lax environment
meaning I can go to the bathroom whenever I damn well feel like it

I worked at Dell in tech support in 1995 - 1997, and this certainly wasn't how it worked back then.

The Of course I made more in absolute dollars then than US based support does now, so if you adjust for inflation its huge.

We were all computer people and given a 6 week course in Computers, only 1 week was on systems, customer service, and scripts. We never worked from scripts and had the freedom to troubleshoot using our instincts.

Now on the other hand, we did have people call in when their computers weren't plugged in. We had to deal with all sorts of customer goofs.

And we fell behind during peak hours. I saw the hold times over 1 hour on many occasions. I would always get people that wanted to rant about how long the hold times were instead of letting me help them. And we were measured in calls per hour, but being on the night shift we were given leeway there.

I actually found customers were the most difficult with a hold time of 20-30 minutes. They would rant and rant and rant. Much longer and they were tired and just wanted to get help and move on.

Things weren't perfect, but they were better than now.

Reading articles like this makes me feel better about working in this call centre. We work directly for the company in question, and even though Tier I is monitored, it’s nowhere near as bad as at outsourced companies. Being in Tier II, I have a lot of freedom, including just walking out for half an hour or so to get some sunshine. Oddly, our customer satisfaction is through the roof. How strange…

@johnva: And therein lies the problem with call center operations. About the only thing that this Cracked article didn't explain is the real source for all this: Call centers that are paid per call. As long as call centers are commonly contracted on a per-call basis, those call centers will blindly focus on stats, because stats mean money.

The truth is, call center management don't give a damn about solving your problems. They want you, and every other caller, on and off the phone as quickly as possible. Therefore, they implement these ridiculous policies on the representatives to maximize the number of calls they take. A representative's average call time and the amount of time they spend in the bathroom have nothing to do with customer satisfaction, and everything to do with cramming more calls into the day.

That's why tech support jobs are soul-sucking; as a support agent, you want to help, but your boss doesn't want you to.

Actually, I'm pretty sure this is why tech support sucks:

@LegoMan322: I don't have direct contact with the customers but I do work on their requests and sometimes the miscommunication drives me insane.

They'll use a term that refers to something other than what they're talking about, they'll make up their own jargon, and sometimes say the exact opposite of what they want.

But the worst is when there's no communication at all. Some people just don't believe in giving you enough information to actually do anything.

"The thing is broken"

*sigh*

@LindsayC: doctoral hilarity ensues: If you had one that was 'Your problems are irrelevant to Technical Support-cat's supervisor and management', it'd be spot on.

I was recently helped by a CSR for over 1/2 an hour to resolve cell phone account issues. They must go crazy with all the stupid deals, plans, and fine print.

@AstroPig7: In our situations, the clients tend to be a lot less disgruntled and crazy (although we do get our fair share...) and a lot more reasonable
Plus if they get out of line, they get in trouble, not us

sometimes I hate my job, but I always say to myself: hey...at least I'm not working at videotron or Telus

@johnva: See, you are smart.. you should manage a call center, but the catch is that you are smart, so you won't work in a call center. The trend continues....

@NightSteel: Yeah, it does seem clear that they're measuring the wrong things, at the very least, and measuring even those things in an idiotic way (though I'm sure some idiot with an MBA gets paid a lot to think of this stuff). The question then becomes, why is this practice so widespread? Are all businesses these days so shortsighted that they'd rather just make customer service so hellish that no one calls in, at the expense of their longterm brand name and customer loyalty? Isn't it cheaper to try to retain your existing customers than to get new ones? I understand how this breakdown in service happens, but I don't understand why businesses think this stuff (call center outsourcing, retarded use of "metrics", hiring semi-literate monkeys to read scripts, etc) is a smart idea.

@johnva:

It was an old woman who had bought her first computer, and her only previous experience was with sewing machines (as someone stated). She'd put the mouse on the floor and was trying to click the buttons with her foot.

Oops!

On having a "second tier" support system, one of the issues with that is it becomes a crutch, and the useless waste of space on the first tiers will simply forward the calls "up" at the first sign of the issue straying from the script.

@ViperBorg - SpaceBat hates Facebook:

They'd probably just send you home for the day. That much idle time KILLS the metrics for the day.

@calquist: Well, I'm no genius but it doesn't take one to see that these practices are foolish in the long run.

I think that we're seeing a combination of short-run thinking/screwed up managerial incentives (the same sort of crap that caused the current financial crisis) and people confusing "metric is easy to measure" with "metric is measuring the right thing". I'd be willing to bet that the "call handle time" thing became popular solely because it was easily measured by a computer system without any need for real research or insight into employee effectiveness or customer satisfaction, not because it actually makes any sense.

@AustinTXProgrammer: 10+ years ago, most tech support was really techy folks on the other end, not the script readers that many are these days. That's not to say that all of them don't know anything, but alas, those with real knowledge are indeed fewer and farther in between.

I work at a technical help desk and when I was in the initial interview I was told that the calls are much more "quality over quantity". Spending 15-20 helping someone and actually fixing the problem is a lot better than trying to resolve an issue in 3 minutes and jacking everything else up.

Although, I have had some cases where there was a technotard on the other line that doesn't know what the "Start" button is or where it's at. Or where the stinking X is to close a window.

*sigh*

Is there anything you can do if you do not wish to have your call recorded?

@SynMonger: I can see that it could become a crutch to someone who is incapable of solving problems for which they don't have a ready-made answer. But that's not a problem for the customer, and it's better for them if the waste of space does forward the calls rather than fail to solve them. If too much forwarding is going on, then management needs to look at training the 1st tier techs better/hiring better 1st tier techs/improving the scripts/etc instead of just failing their customers and punishing people for doing something to actually solve problems they can't solve themselves.

But it's not you. They just hate their jobs and, by the transitive properties of unfocused job place hatred, they hate you too.

I don't know, I think if you're like a couple of the customers described here they probably just hate you directly.

@Frank Murphy: I've actually heard that 'your call may be recorded' message include 'If you do not want your call to be recorded do X".

It was only once or twice though and I think both times it was a medical company. You can ask the CSR if they can prevent the call from being recorded but I'm betting in most cases the only think you can do is hang up.

@johnva: I've long held the opinion that AHT must die. There are reasons why it sticks around though:

First, it's easy, easy, easy to measure. Heck, the reports are all automated so it takes all of five seconds.

Measuring quality is a lot worse. How do you know if the problem is really fixed or not? When I worked on the phones, there were plenty of times that even I couldn't tell if that was true (the customer would try some stuff and call back if necessary). You can't even go with callbacks—are they caused by the first rep being a moron or a completely new issue? If they didn't call back, is that because the problem's fixed or because the customer gave up in frustration?

Second, it's ingrained. I'd be willing to bet that everyone who's spent five minutes in a call center knows exactly what AHT is.

Third, (and this is why I really hate outsourcing, even to US companies), like johnva says, there's a real tension between the interests of the customer and those of the outsourcer.

A wisely run company doesn't want you calling in in the first place. If you must call in, they want the problem fixed right then and there. So from that perspective, if you can avoid another call down the road, it makes sense to spend a little extra TLC on fixing the problems.

An outsourcer just does not have that incentive. In fact, they have the opposite incentive. They're paid by the call, so it's in their interests to (a) keep calls short and (b) generate more business for them by getting you to call back. Actually fixing problems is not something their management cares about since it's not how they get paid and it's not something easily measured in any event (see point #1).

It's even worse when the outsourcer runs both the first and second tier. Then they get paid for each call and each escalation, which is a real conflict of interest. I've even seen cases where the exact same person will take a call, log a ticket, then 12 hours later will work the ticket that they created in the first place (because they work the ticket queue when call volume is down). From a customer service perspective, it's absolutely crazy.

Bottom line: companies need to stop looking at customer service as an expense and start looking at it as a means of retaining customers.

@johnva: The question is, how *else* to contract out your support operations? If you wanted to contract out your support operations, what metrics would you use? How would you measure the success of the contractor? Per-call is easy to measure. If you can find another metric that keeps costs down, is easy to measure, and actually helps customers, then you'll have done what all these companies couldn't.

Heh, I had to do telemarketing for awhile. Man it sucked. Especially when you are a temp and they call you in for the 4-9 pm shift. Of course every person you call just got off from work or is eating dinner.

@AstroPig7:

I did CSR at a decent company too, where we could go to the bathroom or take a walk or whatever within reason. We were measured on how many calls we answered, but also by how well we did. Spending an hour to fix a problem was acceptable, but just pretending to solve an issue (by "fixing it" and having the person call back later with the same issue) was not.

And the next company was even better for the CSRs cause they didn't even have to work. They literally spent all day on MySpace and ignored calls and walk-ins. Made the rest of us very annoyed