Once on the phones the fun begins. You will be assigned a schedule to start with. Most shifts start after 12noon and work until 9-10pm at night or later. Shift bids occur every six months or so. If you get a schedule that you love you most likely will not get to keep it as schedules are generated based on the needs of the company and of the line you work. Most agents work late evenings, do not have weekends off and work at least one if not both days of the weekend. If you are lucky you will get two days off in a row. Most people do not get two days off together.
With each shift bid and change of shift you will change supervisors and teams. The worst thing is to get stuck on a low performing team. Your supervisor will ride you constantly about how you have to do more to carry the team!
Breaks and lunches are controlled by workforce management. You are expected to conform and follow them. No variance or unscheduled break times. Two 15 minutes breaks a day and a 30 minute lunch. Breaks and lunches will vary daily depending needs of the company and are placed in your schedule on a weekly basis.
This position is strictly metric driven. So everything must be quantified and measured. From the length of your calls, to the quality of your calls. Don't sneeze, cough or clear your throat. You are not allowed to be human. And those actions can count against you in QA. Everything is recorded including the weekly sessions with your supervisor so you get critiqued on what is working, what is not working and what you need to fix. Be prepared there is always something that is not working and needs to fixed and they always want more. Lots of scripting and manipulating of wording to get the perfect NPS(net promoter score). Again it appears that they do not really care about the customer or the employee as long as they are able to show the client the numbers to keep the contract.
When I started system issues were rare, however since the beginning of 2014 they are frequent and the techs like to always blame you for the issue. If its your issue you most likely will not get paid and it will count against you in the attendance matrix. Bottom line is too many people loading the system down until it fails.
Calls can be brutal and back to back averaging 60-80 in an 8 hour shift. When I started the irate caller was very few. Now most of the callers seem to be irate and abusive. So you must have a thick skin for this job. This company provides cell phone insurance for the big four cellular providers. Most callers are misinformed and do not understand how insurance works. At the same time in some cases they have been flat out lied to by the salesperson who sold them their phone and did not give correct details on the insurance product.
If you are around long enough you will be forced into cross training. They love to tell you “it will look good on your annual performance review” when it comes to raise. Its all a lie! You are forced to cross train on a different line. You are required to maintain quality, all metrics and product knowledge of both lines. You do not get paid anything extra for cross training. However, you can see your schedule getting changed or being forced to work another line “for the needs of the business.” with no warning at all. At times you just notice you suddenly start getting calls for the wrong line. Then you ask and are told “oh yeah you are switched to this line for the rest of the night” or it could be for the next month. At the same time you are required to be quality scored on both.
The pay is low for this type of position $9 hour for english speaking only and $10 hr bilingual(spanish speakers). They promise 25 cent raises at 30, 60 and 90 days. Most people get the first two and they find some reason to deny giving you the third raise. So the promise of $10 hr or more for english speaker is a lie. Annual performance based raises were pretty sad last last year. Most people got 12-24 cents. They do have a bonus program but in my time with the company the structure of the program has changed. The max is now $800 I think. Since I have never been able to get more than the $75 a month bonus and that happened before they changed the structure I never really paid much attention.
They do offer shift differential for those working past 5pm of 50 cents a hour and after 11pm its an additional $1 an hr. Weekend shift differential is 50 cents an hour. This is the only way you can say that you make more than $10 hr if you figure in shift differential.
Expect to work holidays. Workforce management will change your schedule for the needs of the company. Meaning your day off could change or you could be working a 10 hour shift for a few days surrounding the holiday. They claim they rotate holidays off, but seems like I always got stuck working the holidays. When I asked about it, I was told it was due to shift bid that changed my shift.
Typical call center sweat shop, high volume work, very stressful, high burn out rate, low pay, high turnover rate, lots of change. No work-life balance, no schedule flexibility, very rigid attendance policy.
Management is very reactive and not proactive always chasing metrics!
They love starting new projects or making new requirements and it seems like whoever is making these decision has not a clue what really goes on for the front line agent nor are the changes fully thought through. Maybe of the changes started will last a few weeks or months and just fizzle out. No word on if it was ended or changed. No one seems to know.
