Have compassion when you call tech support. That’s a real live human on the other end of the line (eventually).

Part two of our former Hewlett-Packard CSR heart spilling describes the stressful call center conditions. He wishes HP had on-site counsellors round the clock. If you lasted over 6 months, you were considered a veteran.

Sorry to hear your job was so stinky. Here’s three letters for you: G…E…D.

His letter, inside.

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“ps.. make this anon. I’m going to have to delete this email in a bit. I don’t want my informants to get in deep doggy doo over leaking this info. My NDA died last week between me and the call centre so I don’t care, but theirs is still supposedly in force. But, as I was told in training, they don’t really care if “spouses, family and significant others” find out the inside information. They can’t force their techs to stay quiet, especially with the high stress job with low pay. They need a way to vent somehow and family and friends are the main way. They supposedly have access to “free counselling” but that’s hit or miss. They really need on site councillors available 24/7, but there’s no way the company would ever pay for it.

So, we get the worst of it. I could tell you stories about customers, procedures, faulty service manuals and more. There are certain printers that the CSRs cringe when they hear about them coming in. Or about how the outsourced company’s policy of calling back customers for no less than 6 days was described by HP as akin to stalking. The CSRs are very happy that now all they have to do is tell the customer to call back if there are problems. They were spending all their time calling customers instead of letting calls come in and their “service levels” dropped.

Burn/drop out for the company is easily 70% or more. If you can last there 6 months, you are a veteran of the company and you might have a chance of getting “off the floor” which is the goal of every CSR there. I lasted 3 weeks.

Others in my training class lasted between 1 day and several months. I saw one there after a year. It is almost a rite of passage in this town to be fired from the outsourced company at least once. To say that you were fired from there is not a mark of shame on your resume – it shows that you had the guts to do the McJob they offer. Doesn’t matter if you were there one day or one year. You were there.”

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