An irate reader writes:
100’s of Comcast Customer Account Executives were fired last year and will
be fired this year due to their inability to meet increasingly difficult job
requirements. If you call in to get your cable fixed or have a question
regarding your bill, the phone rep must resolve your issue and try to sell a
core product – internet, phone or digital cable (if you don’t have all 3)
all within 330 seconds. Or, the rep could be fired. They have more and more
difficult job requirements including less time off the phone to work on
issues. And a sales quota that 1/2 the reps are unable to meet. New
employees make $11.50 per hour and it appears that Comcast would rather get
rid of seasoned employees who know how to do their jobs in favor of cheaper
new hires. All employees with customer contact from field techs to internet
support are also told to rush through their jobs or be replaced. Because
Comcast puts failing employees on coaching plans over a few month period,
they also fight the fired employees ability to collect unemployment.
Chances are that if you make contact for billing or service issues, you will
now get an inexperienced trainee rather than a seasoned rep. This is because
the experienced reps have been forced out the door.
Sounds like regular good old capitalsm to me, but it sure sucks to lose your job because you can’t beat the highly precise clock. Obsessive metrics do not make good customer service, kids.
Image from MidWood.net
As a 7+ year customer support vet, I make it a point to never apply to a job that has a length of call limit. My pov is the call lasts as long as it needs to to fix the problem and make sure the customer is happy (or, at the least, not pissed).
During my last unemployment bout, I still refused to apply to a job that said in the JD “Excellent typing skills (calls must last no more than 660 seconds)”
Sorry, that’s not how to run customer support. Work internally to make sure that people are trained and have good support tools and the call length will get shorter on its own, giving the longer calls the average balancing they need.