Out right lying to get you in the door- Me and everyone in my training group and the others who came before and after us were all told the same things. Once you get in at this position and do well you can go anywhere. You can be promoted into another department and get off the floor. You have a career here with job security and advancement.
We quickly found out that we would probably never get into any other department no matter how well we did. If you got a bad team manager you were SOL. Your manager had to back you and give you reference to let you into another department. If you did really well your manager most likely wouldn't want you off the team. And if you came in as Escalations you were already at the top tier as far as position and pay. It was very hard to get into the management training program, where you could slack off, hang out and train people, and you had to take more than a three dollar pay cut if you did decide to go that route and got in.
Merit Based System was Impossible:
Each month you have "numbers" you have to make. You have to have a certain number of surveys. This means during a roadside call you were required to get someone's email address to send a survey. You had to stop and do this no matter how dire their situation was or how angry they were otherwise you would be penalized. This also doesn't guarantee they take the survey, The customer service surveys for other calls were random and you had no control over who got them. Not only are you required to get so many surveys a month but they also must have a perfect 5 on them. Customers are allowed to add comments as well as rate. Many times they will give an under 5 rating and explain in the comments that the agent was great, they just hate the company. That was never taken into consideration. If you have two months within a year where you don't have enough surveys and/or enough 5's you would be fired.
Like wise you also had only a certain amount time you should be on the phone, If you go over you are penalized, but they also don't want or allow, depending on your manager, for you to put someone on hold while working on something complicated, have dead air, or let the person go, work on something complicated that could take 30 minutes to and hour and call them back. You were never EVER allowed or supposed to call someone back even if they got disconnected unless it was a roadside call, and even then you were only allowed to call back once.
If you had to go to the bathroom or get a drink you were really only supposed to do this on lunch and break times. you get two fifteen minute breaks and a 30-hour lunch. If you did have to use the restroom you had to go into something called an "idle" code on your phone. If you had too much idle time you would be fired for something called schedule adherence which I will get to next. If you have a health problem that requires you to use the bathroom a lot, HR will pretend to work with you on it but it is of no use. Even if you take the same or more calls a day than the average person and have excellent customer service scores they will fire you. But before that they will make you feel like the most horrible useless employee ever and shatter your confidence. Again, if you have a terrible manager. Even if you don't your manager will be pressured by the company to tell you how bad you are doing and fire you.
Schedule Adherence:
I don't remember exact numbers but I believe you have to have 80% to 90% schedule adherence. This meant that you clocked on the phone exactly on time and had all 20 programs you needed to use logged in and running and your were on the phone in a few minutes or less each day. With a crap computer system already overclocked it could take a while to get everything up and running. You were not allowed to get everything going before clocking in so you gambled each day.
If you end up on a call and go to lunch or a break late it counted against you in adherence but you had to stay on the call or you would get in trouble. There was a code you could go into five minutes or so before break and lunch to avoid this but it became apparent that the company didn't like this so that was considered shirking work after a while and you would get written up if you did it.
And again God forbid you need to use the restroom outside of break and lunch that day.
If you were outside of adherence more than two months in a row in a year you were fired.
Health Issues:
If you have any health issues that may cause the schedule adherence to be a problem do not work here. They will not work with you on it. They will suggest you take unpaid FMLA leave but also will not offer that to you unless you have been there for a year. It doesn't matter how serious your health problem is. I know someone who was going through liver failure and had to be in and out of the hospital. They told her they were going to work with her but the counted it against her anyway and fired her and she lost her health insurance because of it. And she had worked there for years as a model employee.
Customer Abuse:
At no point are you ever allowed to hang up on a customer. I had one customer tell me I needed to be raped and then commit suicide and then told me since I wouldn't do it myself she was going to find me and murder me, I hung up on her and was penalize for it.
DO NOT WORK FOR THIS COMPANY Unless you get into a position that is not at the contact center, it is absolute hell.
