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If there’s no such thing as a stupid question, there sure are a lot of unnecessary ones

As I’m sure is the case with many of you, our call center has been hit hard with call volume recently. We actually had a program where over the summer, due to lower call volume, you can work reduced hours while still retaining your full time status. Of course, this is not happening this year and our queue is still consistently backed up well into June at this point. (If you wanna just cut to the examples of questions, skip the next two paragraphs)

The thing that really bugs me about this is that corporate/management is trying so hard to combat the queue by micromanaging us as much as possible. Break/lunch conformance wasn’t even really tracked before but it is now, after call work is being stressed more, essentially saying it’s our fault. My manager says stuff like “if everyone is in acw for 2 minutes then that’s this many calls that could be answered during that time” which to me is bs because the queue is often 20-40, my extra minute in acw makes no difference and I need it because we’re answering calls non stop for months in a row now with no down period in sight.

I can rattle off a million ways to improve this system but by far the easiest would be if customers didn’t call in with the most basic, easily answered and utterly unnecessary questions. I don’t care how old you are or how inexperienced you are with technology, some of these questions are a result of just a blatant lack of any troubleshooting whatsoever. When something doesn’t happen the way you expect it to, your first instinct should not be to immediately call our support line. If you’re watching a YouTube video and it buffers, you don’t immediately call/email YouTube right? You refresh the page, pause it and let it buffer, change the video quality, etc. The fact that we are so accessible at our phone line unfortunately encourages people to call with any little thing.

Here are a few examples of the many, MANY calls I get that make me wonder how they even managed to set up an account and log in. One caller asked why she couldn’t change information for one of her contacts. She could, she just had to scroll down to find the edit button. Another caller said their email looked huge and it had never done that before. Her browser was zoomed in. There’s also the time someone asked me how to attach a link when they had already done so.

Stuff like that is actually the most frequent: extremely simple product questions that are easily answered with a quick search of our knowledge base that is always accessible on every page just by clicking “help” and typing in your question. I understand SOME topics are more easily understood when talking to a human. Clicking two buttons in a 3 step article do not quite cut it.

The icing on the cake is that we’re supposed to make offers on a certain percentage of our calls and these calls absolutely destroy those numbers so we can’t even just sit back and relax knowing it’s gonna be an easy call because either it’s going to be a wash in terms of any opportunity to get one in or we have to force something in like “hey now that we know your browser is zoomed out I wanna talk to you about such and such”.

Corporate managed to create a system where almost everything has a way of working against you and the stupid numbers they want you to meet, rather than just helping people… which was the main reason I took this job, is to help people who aren’t as good with technology. It’s amazing to me how out of touch with reality the higher ups are in literally every job I’ve ever had. They try and fail to mask their greed and penny pinching as “putting the customer first” and actually think people buy it. And now I’m ranting about my disdain for corporations and millionaires trying to make more money at the expense of people just trying to pay their bills so I’m gonna stop this post right here.

TLDR: Corporate thinks agents are causing long queues because of idle time but really it’s just people calling about something they could solve themselves in literally two seconds.

submitted by /u/BostonB96
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