Call Center Disciplines Reps If You're Not Happy With Your Collections Call
You've most likely seen those surveys you receive on your receipt, or after a chat session or phone call. Most people ignore them unless they get something in return, or service was exceptionally bad or exceptionally good. According to our source R., though, not answering that survey could help the rep you've just talked to lose his or her job.
R. is familiar with the operations of one of Dish Network's US-based but outsourced call centers, and how their employees are treated and evaluated. He wrote to Consumerist:
Unsurprisingly Dish Network (wholly owned by Echostar) outsources much of its support to US based call centers. Although I have to applaud Dish for choosing a US based call center, the management within that call center leaves much to be desired. I'm going to provide everyone that cares to read it a brief list of the things wrong with Dish Network's call center located in upstate New York. First, allow me to explain exactly what this call center does and the kind of calls that they handle.
This particular call center's primary purpose is to handle "soft collections". The soft collections agents receive in-bound calls from Dish Network subscribers who have an outstanding balance and are attempting to contact Dish Network support. The subscriber may be calling for any of a variety of reasons such as to order pay-per-view or to change the plan to which they are subscribed. Instead of receiving the standard customer support representative they receive a soft collections agent who must attempt to solicit payment from the customer prior to fulfilling the customer's original reason for calling. This call center also handles the overflow from another general customer support call center although it makes up a small percentage of the total calls.
That is all well and good. I understand that Dish Network needs to be paid for the services they provide. What I am not okay with is how Dish Network (and this yet to be named call center) treats their agents. The employees are rated not only on whether they handle calls quickly and follow the guidelines set forth by Dish Network but also on a scale known as "CSAT" or "Customer Satisfaction". The CSAT is a direct grading scale that Dish Network receives from an automated system which calls the customer back after the customer's interaction with the soft collections agent. The automated system asks the customer to rate a variety of categories on a 0 to 10 rating scale. These CSAT scores are useless for the following reasons.
A) Many customers simply hang up or press 0 repeatedly without actually grading the experience.
B) Many customers are dissatisfied because Dish Network would not allow the call center employee to provide pay-per-view or other services due to an outstanding account balance (there is nothing the call center employee could have done better, the customer is simply dissatisfied with Dish Network in general).
C) The customer does not speak English and does not understand the CSAT survey (believe it or not the English speaking call center agents encounter multiple customers per day that only speak Hindi, Japanese, Chinese or another language the call center does not support).
D) A myriad of other reasons...An agent's overall CSAT score is used to determine that employee's overall "worth" to the contract and whether the employee is performing satisfactorily. Repeated low grades on calls can and does result in the employee being suspended from work. The employee can also be "written up" and unsatisfactory reports entered into the employee's employment record. These scores can affect the employee's raises, promotions and even result in termination.
How fair is it to terminate or discipline an employee that has stellar "quality" scores because they do everything (and more) that is required of them by Dish Network during a call but is later rated a zero by the customer because his $300 bill wasn't waived or simply because he felt like it?
Recently, a rating of zero has even been given when all the agent did was take a customer's pay-per-view order. The customer called, got this call center due to the primary customer support call center receiving a high volume of calls, the agent answered, verified account info, placed the pay-per-view order, the customer got the pay-per-view they ordered but rated the experience a zero when the system called back. How is that the agent's fault and why should the agent suffer?
There has got to be a better way to grade soft collections reps than this. No matter how nice the person I'm on the phone with might be, the nature of the call will color the customer's perception of what happened—if the customer bothers to fill out the survey at all.
Maybe this is a cost-saving measure so management doesn't have to record and evaluate calls, but if so, it's a poor evaluation choice for this type of call center.
(Photo: boltron)
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Comments:
Sounds like Convergys.
Call center operations use ridiculous metrics for two main reasons: First, to give them an excuse to fire whomever they want, whenever they want. Second, so they can say that you were terminated for cause and therefore deny your unemployment benefits.
Getting uppity? Your metrics suck. Bye! Been around too long and getting paid too much? Your metrics suck. Bye! Wouldn't blow the boss? ...you get the idea. Oh, and by the way, you were terminated for performance reasons, so you can forget about unemployment!
CSAT is not fair for employees anywhere. All these evil companies do is exploit the purpose of surveys.
Over two years working for Staples and each fiscal quarter I could see how incredibly pissed off some of my managers were, losing out on bonuses (which accounts for up 25% of their salaries) because of 1 out of 5 star customer satisfaction survey responses such as "the product was to expensive"
Seriously, how the hell is that fair? The suites determine the price points, they also determine the minimum required CSAT scores to obtain bonuses. And the CSAT requirements change all the time!
That is similar to my situation - I work for AT&T in the wireless department and in a collections call center. People call in and are mad that I don't restore service on their cell phone because they haven't paid their bill for 3 months, and they leave all zero's (the lowest score) for the post-call survey. The post-call surveys are used in conjunction with recorded calls to measure call quality. It's frustrating sometimes, but it is what it is (as crappy as it is).
Comcast employees are also subject to disciplinary action up to and including termination based off after call phone surveys. To ensure high scores, employees are required to inform customer of possible survey, and more or less request/beg for a good score. I doubt any of this truly improves a customers experience.
Every time I call Esurance, they ask if I would mind taking part in a 15-second one-question survey. I have the right to opt out if I wish to or do not understand. It just asks you to rate the rep's performance from 0-5 with 0 being terrible and 5 being great. It honestly takes all of 3 seconds but you can say no and hang up... No harm no foul.
I guess I wouldn't take the job, then.
I work for Time Warner and they also have ridiculous call center metrics. You can be just awful to the customers and get good stats (in fact it kind of helps if you are). But take the time to really resolve a customer's issues and your talk time is shot, no matter that it is the customers 5th time calling in on a unresolved issue. Plus the way that CSAT data is pulled means sometimes a customer is grading the rep before you but you get that reps stats and you would be surprised how many people call right back because they forgot to ask another question. Even the reps that handle the escalation desk get CSAT scores.
Just another case of corporate bullcrap. I work in a call center too (for a bank) and we deal with this stuff all the time.
I'll take 1000 calls in a month, do great, but if 3 random surveys come back with negative comments, I'm in hot water.
And its always for some dumb reason like I couldnt drop their interest rate to 0% or they've been late 9 times I cant take any fees off.
Is AFNI still handling those accounts?
I used to work for those bastards, though not in the collection area.
@savdavid: Let me fix that for you.
"I guess I'd go home and tell my child that there was nothing to eat for dinner, then"
Some of us have to take jobs that suck in order to fulfill our responsibilities, you may learn about that after you move out of your parents house.
My point of view as a former manager in the Call Centre industry:
These can be a valuable tool, and are a big part of the performance management process, when used correctly. Everyone is going to run into situations where a customer maliciously fills out a negative survey to "get back" at the company, or a policy they disagreed with, despite how well the agent tried to handle it. The thing is, if you are doing your best on every call, then chances are you should get the same amount of "bogus" surveys as everyone else - if you get more negative results than the others, it's not because you got more mean customers, it's because you are doing something different than your peers. (Unless of course, you man a special "mean customer line" that no one else takes calls from. In that case, your results shouldn't be compared to theirs...)
Individual negative surveys should never be "punished" on their own - you need the whole picture, including listening to the call if you can pull recordings. CSAT should be used as a flag to review a particular situation or an agent, not as a single metric to dole out rewards or punishment with.
Wouldn't that stuff would balance out, though? If everybody gets non-english-speakers, and most calls are actually collections, cust sat would be low overall. And it should be possible to pick out the outliers, whether positive or negative.
As for using them as excuses to terminate employees without unemployment, if that happens to you, contact an attorney.
I suspect that (A) and (C) are minority of all surveys.
Agents are rated comparative to each other, not to absolute performance metrics. This is done to balance customer feedback vs expense of high employee turn-over.
Seems like OP is upset about some jerks giving him negatives. Cheer up, you don't need to be ideal, you just need to be better than the worse 20%.
Fark those darn automated surveys. If an innocent employee is caught in the cross fire, who gives a darn.
My time is my time and my time is valuable. You want to know how good, bad or otherwise a call that I placed to your company went then you have two farking choices. A) See if I remain a customer... that is pretty obvious how well I think the call went. or B) Pay me for my farking time.
I make $67 per hour at my day job. Double for any over time. Pay me my overtime rate, billable in one hour increments with an one hour minimum, and I will be happy like a clam in sauce to give you all the farking information you want.
Don't want to pay me? Then you don't need to know if little stupid suzi did her job well until the day I cancel my contract with your feeble company.
@azzie: "I suspect that (A) and (C) are minority of all surveys."
Really? You can rest assured that if someone calls me to survey me about service, I'm pounding zero.
This is oddly relevant to me. Yesterday I called my electric company twice and both times I opted to do the survey before I was put through to the rep. Both reps were very nice, and I'd have rated them highly - of course, my problem wasn't solved but I wouldn't have dinged them for that, they were helpful and friendly - but both of them sent me to a dead line afterwards. No dial tone, but no survey either. I waited a while and hung up.
@azzie: It would be nice if the CSATs were used comparatively in this call center but they're not. They're being used to temporarily cut staffing during periods of low call volume. The call center was searching for ways to cut costs and this was only one way they're doing it.
Since this article was submitted so many employees have walked out that they're now doing mandatory overtime just have sufficient staffing. The moment they realized that they were short staffed and needed overtime from everyone they sent out a memo suspending all scheduled / expected pay raises indefinitely due to "economic hardship". It really makes it look like they can only afford to pay overtime or give raises, not both.
I suppose it all balances out, 30 hours one week and over sixty the next. Just don't expect any fringe benefits for your trouble like that 90 day eval & raise you were expecting.
I'm sure we'll be hearing from other employees.
R-
Wouldn't all of those reasons apply equally to all the employees though (over time, that is)? In other words, if X people who call skip over the survey, or don't understand it, or whatever, wouldn't EVERYONE have the same number of bad reviews? Thus, either they fire just about everyone or take that into account.
Sounds like sour apples to me.
When I needed to call Toyota Financial on two separate occasions, they were exceedingly helpful and friendly. Within 2 days of each call, I got a call asking if I'd mind commenting on my experience. They then gave me a barrage of questions that took a good 10 minutes to read out over and over and over and over...
"Was your representative courteous, 1-7 with 7 being the highest?"
"Was your representative friendly, 1-7 with 7 being the highest?"
"Was your representative pleasant, 1-7 with 7 being the highest?"
"Was your representative cheerful, 1-7 with 7 being the highest?"
"Was your representative helpful, 1-7 with 7 being the highest?"
and on and on
They could have just said "Did you find your call helpful and pleasant? Yes or no?" I'd be happy to answer that. But the 10 minutes of asking basically the same question over and over in different ways was a real waste of time.
@azzie: I think you are wrong about this.
Many customers don't like those stupid surveys and I'm sure the reason some of the agents failed is because the person chose all zeros because they HATED THE SURVEY.
Or on top of that because they didn't get what they wanted, even if what they wanted was extraordinarily unreasonable.
This post brought me right back to my call center days. We started with a point scale eval system where 80 was the perfect score but you could hit 54, 62, 78 whatever depending on how you handled the call.
Later it was changed to an "all or nothing" model where if you did ONE THING wrong, you failed the ENTIRE CALL. These rulings could never be challenged or disputed, you just had to suck it up and deal with it.
I was once failed on a call for transferring a customer even though I had checked an internal knowledge base on company policies and procedure which told me the correct procedure was to transfer the call! My supervisor didn't bother trying to fight it for me, he just blew it off, but call center sups are another rant for another day.
Years ago I used to go to a Honda dealer for maintenance and repairs. Without fail, the team member helping me would point out that I might get called by Honda for a survey on the visit and if I didn't give them top scores for every question they'd get in trouble. These were the same people who were telling me I'd need to wait 45 minutes when it would turn out to be 2 1/2 hours and who would try to sell me maintenance and/or repairs that weren't needed yet (with a wink, an 'I'll take care of you', and an offer of 10% off a major maintenance item that I could get done elsewhere for 2/3 of their price).
So I'd tell the occasionally survey person the truth, maybe get a free oil change for having to wait hours longer than I was told, and the same thing would happen the next time.
I don't go there anymore.
My brother works for a popular company that sells instructional DVD's in the call center. His job is not to give you the free DVD you order, but to upsell you additional items to "try" out. Of course, the idea is if the customer doesn't send the items back in time, their credit card is charged. He has to keep his upsell numbers above 30% or he gets a warning, no bonus, etc. Hang ups, prank calls, people masterbating. It all counts against your numbers. Even giving the caller the one item they ordered counts against your percentage because you didn't upsell them! It's just another way of keeping you and your pay down.
@azzie: i pay by the minute for my prepaid cell phone service. i hang up on those surveys every single time
@tungstencoil: or they just fire everyone in turn and have very high turn over, thus avoiding raises, bonuses and paying insurance for anyone long enough for them to actually use it
I don't understand (C). If a person speaks "only Hindi, Japanese, Chinese," etc, how would they understand the instructions to press any button at all? Speaking for myself, I get phone calls from Spanish-speaking telemarketing companies (I assume; they're recorded messages in Spanish and have that telemarketing feel to them) and, because I don't understand Spanish, I simply hang up; I don't just press random buttons to see what happens. Can someone elaborate on that a bit?
I have worked in call centers for most of my life. I seem to be one of the lucky few that is able to perform just right so that I do not get into trouble for 'not meeting goal.'
What I can tell you is that there is no way accept through sheer luck that you can make any of the goals set out. People in general are to (BLEEPING) stupid to spend the time to look through and read the materials they received with their credit card applications, order catalogs, you may have won, or free gift items to see if what they are looking is actually in the literature they received. All information that people call in for IS IN THE INFORMATION THEY RECEIVED! But they are to lazy to look for it so they see the phone number and just call it. *End rant*
Just today I had my quality assurance go over. I have a long time realized that passing QA's were either impossible or more luck and a custmr that totally justs is patient and nice. The absurd + clueless. i just cant explain it. i would like to just fix it. but how cheerful i am seems to be the priority. Some supervisor a while back says cheerful is better than smart. ok
@azzie:
Actually, when dealing with those surveys, one would THINK that the numbers are relative. They're not. That's management logic for you.
Our surveys are graded on an SAT-like scale. If a customer skips a question entirely, it doesn't count toward the final score. If they rate something as "No Opinion," it counts as a 0.
The only way for us to really come out ahead is if a majority of customers rate us as the highest rating (usually "somewhat better"). That's OK in principle, but if we have a busy day or a single customer holding up a line, it ensures that the majority of survey-respondents will complain about service.
It doesn't help, either, that the individuals most likely to respond to a survey are the ones who feel they were wronged in some way.
You'd be surprised (or not?) how many people will do exactly that when confronted by a prompt they don't understand. Internal logic suggests they're trying to reach an operator who might speak their language, but I'm not sure whether or not that's the real reason.
Actually it is not as off base as it seems, the method is pretty solid. Callers come in at randomly giving an equal chance of a the Rep getting a A,B,C or D (see above) All reps will get the same balance of bad or good calls. The only difference it the way the rep treats people. Compaired against the avg, will show the good reps vs bad.
"believe it or not the English speaking call center agents encounter multiple customers per day that only speak Hindi, Japanese, Chinese or another language the call center does not support"
Oh geee, really? There's more than just people speaking English? With any large company customer base, you are ALWAYS going to have individuals that only speak a different language.
@CrazyMann: Right, if the team is graded on a curve for comparison between team members and for % increase in CSAT for performance improvement, that can work. But if the employees are graded on an absolute scale like "no CSAT survey rankings of zero" or "all CSAT scores of good or higher" it makes everyone vulnerable to the random idiots and becomes an excuse for management to terminate the employee or for denying bonuses or advancement.
The survey isn't the problem. It's the way it gets used.
Wow, I feel lucky then. The callcenter I work in actually records your calls and listens to them to assess the quality. No post-call surveys. Course, that also means you have to make sure every call is up to par, but overall that's a good thing.
Only complaint I have is that you're scored based on a script, not on the actual quality of your call. If you're rude to the customer, but followed the script, you pass. If you are the best rep the customer has ever spoken to, and he/she could not have been happier with their service; then good for you, but did you follow the script? No? You fail. It's better than being graded based on a customer survey though.
I couldn't read past "myriad of."
Don't use words you can't use correctly!
@azzie: I'd be surprised if category A didn't account for a decent percentage of the survey calls:
1) People don't want to stay on the phone longer than necessary, especially if they were on hold.
2) People don't want to burn up their minutes on cell phones.
3) People assume that not answering doesn't hurt the CSR.
People are already cranky whenever they even have to call any kind of customer service. They are nervous about getting what they want, impatient with waiting times, annoyed with how the rep seems to be speaking from a script and not really directly to them, dreading what they are sure will be a lousy experience (going by past experiences). These surveys are inherently biased. If I ever have to take one, I'll be as nice as possible to the rep, then I'll try to get in touch with a higher-up in the company whom I can tell that these survey are total bullshit.
@bwcbwc:
Plus in this case we're talking about collections agents. Who's gonna hit the "wonderful experience" button when they've just been told they're a deadbeat and need to pay up?
@blueneon: I work for them too but in data. I've gotten all 0s for stuff we don't support. I got all 0s once because I referred a customer to microsoft because problems with their outlook on their computer.
I also love our metrics. Since they base bonuses on them now they change them every three months to lower handle time and add more policies. For awhile one policy was for me to email a customer an article on every call. Just what the customer wants more junk email.
At sears they used to have them print out with a number to call for a 5 dollar coupon. Anyways if we didn't get all 10s it was said that we failed. So associates would tell customers that if they didn't give us all tens we'd fail. So whats the point of this survey if it isn't to improve your score. Anyways some of the question were like the lighting in the store or the bathrooms. I remember I failed many for that and I was a cashier with no control over it.
Sounds like an excuse to not give out raises and bonuses.