It’s still up to you to manage your ACW

Oh boy, so I have another story from my outbound sales days for an Australian telco.

So basically, we were a BPO doing outbound work under strict instructions to not open or touch a customer’s account if they weren’t authenticated. However, the feedback from the client was saying that these calls from us were becoming impossible to actually verify that we were authorised representatives of the company.

The rule changed that with each customer we call, whether they answer or not, we had to leave a generic note saying that we called and to call x to discuss outbound offers.

We used Siebel for our CRM, and if anyone’s used Siebel, you’d know how slow and buggy it is. The issue became that we had to leave these notes during ACW. Now, you don’t have to be a genius to know that our ACW stats were blown for each person as they had to fumble around trying to save an interaction with each customer’s account, even if it went to voicemail.

When they changed the rule, they kept the ACW metric still at 8% but for everyone, it went to around 20% for the teams with this rule. Even if we were efficient, Siebel still would take so long to load an account and then to save the interaction.

When this was raised with management, we were told that it was still up to us to manage our ACW.

Even ones who were really good with their ACW, had their stats get thrown out and we were told to suck eggs and to do our job better, when it was quite evident that it wasn’t from poor time management or job performance when it impacted each and every single person. Still not sure if they were being a stickler from the client’s instructions or the BPO’s instructions.

I left not too long after this.