Hey All,
I worked at one call center that was a third party company (think Convergys) to handle customer support for a U.S. based satellite TV company. We were basically given three tools (e-mail, intranet support and account management system). I will go into how most of these were useless.
First I want to mention this third party company does not have the best track record and has lost a few contracts in the past few years in providing third party support.
E-mail: They could have honestly not given this to us and just sent announcements to our personal e-mails. We could receive e-mail BUT not send it. Not even to reply like “okay, thanks or you’re welcome”. Apparently they didn’t want to give us that much power to respond to internal e-mails. This was not an issue, because any e-mails you would send to customers would be automated ones sent to them from the intranet support system. The only people who had fully accessible e-mails were supervisors and the higher ups. We would get an e-mail requesting “Can all of you reply to let me know you received this”. And we all had that look of “how the hell do you want us to communicate this ,when we can’t respond to e-mails…smoke signals?” This required much of the time of going to their office just to say “yes, I got your e-mail”.
Intranet Support: Keep in mind, we had one computer at each desk (think about the old clunky Dell monitor computers from the early 2000’s), because again third party call center who wanted to spend as little as possible. This also only had one monitor, so with most people who now needing at least two to work efficiently, we had to work on multiple programs on one monitor, which resulted in (you guessed it) the computer crashing or being super slow. This was most likely to using outdated equipment. This intranet support system had you go through multiple pages to find an answer, and the search option was not of much help in that regard.
Account Management Software: I think the program we used was RIO or something like that. This was probably the one program that we had that worked all the time which was good because it was the only way to access customer accounts and answer any questions they had. But again it also had its limitations (issuing certain values of credits, updating certain customer information (we had to get approval for a lot of these things, that would normally you could use your best judgement on).
It was honestly just a big mess, which is why many of the people I went through training with, quit and I followed suit shortly after.
It makes me appreciate the full accessibility we have now. We have systems that work 99% of the time, a personal work laptop for each employee and two monitors (a lot of us work remote, so it is your own personal setup where that is concerned), everyone has their fully accessible work e-mail to send and receive (imagine that lol). We also have a leadership team that stands with its employees and many of our improvements have come from recommendations of all our staff.
Anyone work or have worked for a company where they did not give you the tools to effectively do your job?
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