Where do I begin? The service department was constantly understaffed, undertrained, and undersupported. They have a call queue that is ALWAYS backed up (max hold time I ever saw was over 8 hours!!!) so there is never a moment of downtime and the customers were always (rightfully) mad because of how long they had to wait. At any competent company, management would respond to this glaring issue by trying to hire more people and improving retention but instead, they literally responded with actions that directly increased turnover.
They have this stat called After Call Work (ACW). The amount of ACW you are allotted is dependent on the specific product(s) you support, but I was allotted four minutes (regardless of the duration of the call). At all times, they have multiple managers constantly watching the ACW list (as well as other micromanaged stats) for the entire department. Instead, all these resources were tied up in directly draining the resources of the people on the front lines, because if you go even one second over ACW, you can expect to receive 1-5 copy-pasted messages almost in unison that literally just say, "ACW?" So now, not only do you have to finish the actual logs from a long/complex call, but you have to respond to each of these managers explaining what happened and why you dared to take 4m 1s writing your logs. Keep in mind that almost all of these people were trained in support but never even lifted a finger to help even during the worst peak queue times. I want to reiterate the time scale that we're talking about here, the queues were longer than my entire shift, yet they would freak out and expect responses about you going over time by 30 seconds to ensure the notes were decent and the problem was fixed. This is a management problem, not an employee problem.
Not only that, but they treat you like a robot, not a person. If you have to go to the bathroom, too bad, because, again, you will literally get questioned by one/multiple managers why you were out of queue for three minutes after finishing your ACW, then tell you that you should have gone on your break. I wish I could say this was just one or two bad apples, but this was literally the entire service department's management. They are so obsessed with controlling every little action their employees take that they don't even stop to consider the fact that Joe Blow taking care of business is not going to cause the support department to collapse, but bad management will. This obsessive exercise of control is exactly why their turnover rate is so high. Not only do they micromanage you once you're on the floor, but they don't even train you well prior to tossing you to the wolves. After a full week of training, my entire training class didn't even understand what product we would be supporting or what it does. Let me repeat that. An entire week of full-time, in-person training didn't even manage to teach us what product we were supporting or what that product did. It was obscene.
I also want to mention the fact that, for all the managers micromanaging me from start to end of every single shift, the one "manager" I never heard from was my own. Over the course of six months, I quite literally spoke to her two times: once when I was told I was being put on her team and once when I was left the company. I worked under her for six months and couldn't even tell you her name. I have no idea how any support department in the world (especially for an Fortune Most Admired company and a leader of industry that is rolling in money) can be this terribly managed, but I don't think I've ever seen a more incompetent set of managers in my life.
