How I exited the Call Center industry.
I had worked in two different call centers in my life. I may have other tales later. Right now. I like to tell the story of my exit from it.
The call center had many projects. I was assigned to support a very large networking company. They provided the parts for business, police, banks and stuff. These places had remote support and contracts to replace parts as they failed. So say a bank machine went down. Its remote support would know what should have failed or can find out I assume. Sometimes they had to ho through tech support to trouble shoot or they may have a contract to order the replacement part and send a field engineer to replace the part.
At first I started in their logistics group where we field calls on tickets to dispatch parts and field engineers. This required contracts for specific locations so parts could be assign to an appropriate warehouse so parts could be sent to a site on time. Time to time which was way often then not. So what part went down. For what ever dumb reason there was no location for said site updated in their maintenance contract. This would often cause no part assigned for that customer. If their was access parts we could often dispatch it. Or if their support company was a big spender with us. They can often escalate and get the part anyway. This may or may not cause a delay in what ever contract window they have for service level.
So far I am giving background to my story. Through my time there I kept getting new tasks on this project. More workload with no pay raise. More work no extra pay. However the company gets paid more for each of these additional tasks. Gee that sounds fair right. Not!! I was getting tired of this noise. Then it happened, they got offered a position with more pay where you researched cases for the first instance of a delay in how a ticket was handled. I was offered one of these 3 positions. This us where my end of days began. Where I finally told the soul sucking industry I am done with it.
The thing with me is if you give me a lot of data/ information I will find patterns and see where things are actually going wrong. I forget how long I was on this particular final project. It often lead to a lot of research. I was the sole person in charge of overseeing North America for this. I see often how many orders that missed service levels and because the company only wanted the first failure as the reason to miss it. Often really not. We would have do many that missed because the contract was not updated with the current location. Had no ideal until then a server first a company can change time to time or they just never gave the right one for what ever reason. Not my problem do not care. Often enough I was able to flag it as the customers problem for not updating their l oui cation. Or well you just signed the contract 2 days ago. Sorry but we got 30 days to assign the part. Not our issue yet. Other issues we look st and see tech support not picking up the case fast enough or just took longer to trouble shoot. Many things caused failure. I started to get annoyed by what was accepted as the reason when really it was not.
My final months were during the ice storms of 2014. Failure rate went through the roof our 3rd person our support person was gone from the project she hated it. There was a point the company tried put more tasks on me. Rising stress and ability to fo my new main job. What was nice on this project I reported directly to the client. I told them these extra tasks are making this difficult. I wanted them gone as they were going pay me the same for even more work. That mangers clout got it gone good and fast. Made me happy, then the ice storms from hell. It crippled North America nothing was meeting service levels. Even though the root cause was indeed the storms I was expected to look for the first problem. I quickly in all this saw certain patterns and escalated this to my client manager. Push back at first but they then came up with reason codes for me to use. As the storms still caused havoc my work l oui and rose.
Around this time of my life I was improving my health eating better and stuff maybe stories for later. Anyway by February I was ame across this upcoming art installation. I was taking a lot of great photos on my hikes and exploitation of the city. They wanted one that would be kinda electronic inspired. I have no idea why I decided to give it a shot and got chosen to put in one of 12 or 13 exhibit’s. So I built a wall put a hole in it. Got a picture frame and installed a blank canvas. I borrowed a projector and set up a slide show with a bunch of my photos I took and set it on the canvas to give a look of a changing painting. It was fun the security guy for there called me Dennis the artist. I helped out a lit on this. I was fed up with my job.
So I thought duck this noise. I went to work. Surfed the internet and did nothing for the month. I let a massive amount if work to build up. 2 days before deadline I decided to go through my idea. I got on messenger and asked a buddy of mine who went to work early like me. I asked him to give me the bosses email address. Moments later he responds. You are going to quit? I am like yes I am. He damn well knew we were close friends. He gave it to me. So I sent the best email of my life.
Hey Ron, I am not coming in. Hey Ron I am not coming in tomorrow. Oh yeah I am not coming in any more, and you cannot make me. I know this puts you in a lurch. But you do not pay me enough to care
Dennis
Boom I quit. It was glorious. I was even able to get 36 weeks of EI. Call centers here are an industry you can still often get EI if you quit. I left out some info, but maybe if you like it I might have more stories about my days there. Quiting this job did fundamentally change me. That’s another story.
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