Turnover - not the apple kind
There's a lot of turnover where I work. Turnover as in employees leaving and new ones being hired. Some of these employees leave because phone tech support isn't their cup of tea, some leave because they are college students (change of school schedule, a job opportunity in their chosen field, etc.) and quite of few of them get fired. It's very easy to get fired where I work. Some people can't meet the attendance requirements. Hell, most people couldn't meet the attendance requirements. Some people can't meet the performance requirements and the jury's still out on whether I can meet those. I apparently have a "good phone presence", but I don't always hit all of the QA points and I suck at tracking my calls. I've worked really hard this last week to remember to say "Thank you for calling company X" at the end of my calls even though it doesn't usually fit the conversation flow. It's awkward to throw it in there, but damned if I'm gonna lose 3 points on my next evaluation because I didn't say it. In fact, I get a headache when I look at the QA call template. You could follow that letter perfect and really piss off a customer in the process. Which is part of my problem with call tracking. We track by user name and while it's always nice to get this right away, I think it's better to listen to the customer talk and not interrupt them asking for their user name. As a result, I'm usually several minutes into a call before I get their user name and start "tracking". Call me inefficient, but at least I'm not rude Or snotty. I get call after call from customers who tell me the previous tech they spoke with was "snotty". Interesting adjective to be used so often and by so many different people. I'm tempted to ask them what they mean by "snotty", but this would take up precious minutes of call time and there's not a damn thing I can do about it other than make sure I'm not "snotty" as well, whatever it is that "snotty" means. I had a really angry customer yesterday who was upset because the previous "snotty" tech kept telling her that her problem was just "user error". Well yes, it was "user error", but just telling her that didn't solve the problem. After a little investigation, it turns out she was automatically capitalizing her password when it needed to be all lower case. She didn't even realize she was doing that. She was a touch typist, with a proper noun for password and it was an unconscious capitalization on the first letter. I decided it was probably a common mistake and so I told her that. It's amazing, the effect of telling someone they've made a "common mistake". They immediately feel better, you can hear it in their voice. We had a good laugh about it, she got connected to the internet and all was good. I wish all my calls had a successful ending, but they don't. Customers with dial-up access can't usually talk to me and test their connection at the same time. A few have two phone lines and some call on cell phones, but even that is a double edged sword because while it means you can find out the end results of your suggested fix, it also means your call time is that much longer. And call times are one of those all important tracking points. From a job performance standpoint it's better to have customer close out the call to test. From a problem resolution standpoint, it's better to keep the customer on the phone so that if the fix you suggested doesn't solve the problem you can immediately move to the next thing to try without them having to call back and get a different tech who may or may not understand what you've already troubleshot. I blame this dilemma not on my employer or even company X that dictates the standards, but the whole concept that jobs can be somehow distilled down to nothing more than performance statistics and metrics. Honestly, does "average length of call" really mean anything other than "average length of call"? While it might indicate someone with really poor troubleshooting skills, it's just as likely to indicate someone with really good skills. Ah well, I suppose in the subjective realm of measuring "customer service", one metric is as good as any other. As long as employers are intent on trying to measure, quantify and analyze operations in order to translate their employees into some kind of numbers they can manipulate on paper then we'll all be stuck with this sort of thing. It's a false reality, these numbers on paper, but false reality seems to be where half the world is operating these days.