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TL;DR at the bottom.
I was a technician, working in a lab. My job was to repair car parts for this third party repair company.
The company made such monumentally stupid decisions in a very short span, than over 50% of the call center all quit within 3 days of each other.
So, the company started dragging employees from other departments kicking and screaming into the call center. Every day, I’d walk in and ask the building manager “What’s up today? Am I doing my job? Or am I answering phones?” And he’d sigh and say “answering phones”.
Well, I quickly learned what made alot of the call center quit. You see, at this company, we had a really good warranty policy. Lifetime warranty on the part, regardless of who owns it at any given time. If it has our sticker on it, and the sticker hasn’t been defaced, we will service it for free. If you aren’t happy with the quality, you can ask for a refund if you were the original person who sent it in for work in the first place.
Well. It turned out we were losing money because when stuff would come in for warranty repair, some of the sales people would grab it, rip our sticker off, throw it in the junk pile, and call the customer saying we couldn’t fix it, but we have a perfectly good one here that they can sell at a discount. They did this so much that customers started just asking for refunds instead.
We got so many refund requests that the building manager told the call center that we would not be honoring the warranty anymore, but not to tell the customers that. Lead them on. When they ask for a refund, tell them it’s being processed and will take up to 6 weeks. 6 weeks from now, when they call asking where their refund was, tell them it was in the wrong stack of paperwork, or there was an error at the bank, whatever excuse you can think of, and tell them it’ll be another 6 weeks. Keep doing this until they stop calling.
Well, the call center revolted. More than half quit. When I found out this is what happened, I told them they don’t want me on the phones, because I will not lie to customers. Building manager said tough shit, till they can hire more people for phones, I’m stuck there.
So, when someone called, pissed off that they haven’t received their refund, I profusely apologized, let them know I’m sure there is a good explanation, let me get you a manager, and I cold transferred them to the building manager. He’d come back to his desk, find like 30 people on hold in his que.
He got pissed, told me to stop cold transferring people. So, I told him the only option left would be to warm transfer people. He thought I was kidding… I was not. Every 3 or 4 minutes, I’d let a new customer know I can get them the manager. I’d transfer them, get up, walk over to the managers office, and tell the manager “Hey, so and so from X company is on your line, pissed off that you’re refusing to give them a refund. Have fun!”
Eventually I got pulled into a meeting with him and the CFO, and was told in no uncertain terms that if I continued to do so, I would be fired. I reminded them that the only reason this is happening in the first place is because A, they came up with this shitty plan in the first place. B, They’re making me answer phones instead of doing my job. And C, they can’t keep anyone, because whenever they hired someone new, the rest of us
would fill them in on what’s happening, and they would subsequently quit after their first day.
In the end, I found a better job, and quit that hellhole, and on my last day, filed a complaint with OSHA, filling them in on all the illegal/dangerous shit they’d make us do in the lab.
TL;DR: Was forced to work in a call center for about 3 months, despite it not being my job. Went against company policy and cold-transferred irate customers to the manager, because they did not pay me enough to deal with preventable bullshit.
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