Talk about a whiner

Normally I am all for people getting tattoos if that is what they want. I feel it is wrong to to think that all people who get tattoos are drug users, gang members or whatnot — that is hurtful stereotyping.

However, I also think that Rebecca Holdcroft from the UK is a whiner. She has a lot of tattoos, as you can see from the picture on that page, and her employer would like her to cover them up. She says how she's been ask to wear a cardigan and at a previous job “on a hot day I passed out and cracked my head in a toilet cubicle”. Oh poor baby. There are long sleeved shirts that you can buy which can be worn on a warm day, and Britain doesn't even get that hot in the summer! Now if she lived in the Mediterranean area, I might have some sympathy.

Now I say this as a person who has a tattoo — your employer has the right to require that you dress in a fashion which they feel will be presentable and acceptable to their customers and clients. If you don't want to, then your employer has the right to put you in a a non-public facing position, even if it pays less and is in the back broom closet.

Rebecca — give it up. Stop being a whiner. It's not like this is a real issue like freedom of speech or equal rights regardless of age, sex or race.

I work too much?

So today I get into work and what do I see in my inbox? Email wanting an explanation of the 88 hours I sumitted on my timecard and why it was there was overtime. In fact, there were multiple requests les less than a hour's span by the time I got through my 3 day weekend backlog of email.

Now I'm not exactly sure why it was called “overtime” as it was two weeks at 44 hours each, which isn't enough to qualify for the time and one half of "overtime". OK, my scheduled shift is 4 days at 10 hours each day (10.5 if you count the unpaid lunch), so maybe that's what my boss's boss was referring to.

So I say how yes, my shift does end at midnight but I am supposed to stay until the last agent finishes their last call and is logged out. Sometimes that is at 00:15 and sometimes it is 00:45, but usually it is by 00:30. So, an extra half an hour per day times 8 days is an extra 4 hours in two weeks. Because of that, on average I clock in a base amount of 84 hours every two weeks. Occasionally less if call volume has been light for a few weeks.

On top of that, given the nature of my job and how I have to be easily accessible to whomever, I have been told multiple times by my boss and my boss's boss that if it is too busy I am not supposed to go for lunch. Nor can I go for lunch or break unless I can get some other centre to remotely watch mine while I am gone. That is the basis of why why my position is the only one who is allowed to have food & drink on the production floor. Perk for having to eat while on duty.

So the last two weeks were busy, new software and watching Kelowna while my counterpart there has been on vacation, and I was not able to take a lunch break any day. So, again 30 minutes per lunch is an extra 4 hours in a two week period. An that is what made it 88 hours. While this is not always the case, nor has 88 hours been unheard of. Except for sick days (a whopping 3 total) My clocked hours for the past year and a half have consistently been between 82 and 88 hours each pay period and nobody has said anything until now. Indeed, there have even been a few 90 hour pay periods with actual real 1.5 time base wage overtime thanks to an agent being on a two hour long call that started 15 minutes before the end of my shift to which nobody said boo.

“Just because it's been happening doesn't make it right” replies my boss's boss, less than ten minutes after my explanation. “I would like it to stop immediately.”

So I reply that “sure, I can trim my hours to exactly 40 per week, but that means I can no longer stick around after midnight for the last agents to finish up their calls. In fact, I cannot guarantee that the queue will even be drained by midnight for me to announce last call to the agents before I clock out,” so could he please let me know how he wants me to do things from now on? After all, he was the one who told me that I had to stay as long as the last agent to logout and to not take lunch when it was too busy.

That was at 13:18 in my boss's boss's timezone, almost six hours ago. So I'm wondering — why no reply in less than 10 minutes this time?

Well, I can hardly believe it, but it's been 6 and one half months now since I started worked for Marusa Marketing/TeleperformanceUSA here in Cambridge.

In my last post about this I had just finished the firast day of learning lab which the two weeks after the training in which you have to get used to actually taking calls from customers but not expected to perform to production expectations (call length, number of sales, etc...). At that point I was pretty much in a "grit my teeth and bear it" mode simply because I needed a job and this was it.

But on the last day of learning lab, a Friday, I heard that a position in Mission Control (more on that later) had opened up. I filled out an internal application for that, emailed a soft copy of my resumé to the training manager as soon as I got home that night, came in on Saturday to specifically drop a hardcopy. On Monday, what was to have been my first shift on the production floor, I came in about 3 hours early, all dressed up with a tie, to try and get myself an interview for the position. The idea was to show that if I would do this much to try and get and interview then just think of what I will do if I get the job.

Shannon, the Mission Control person on shift right then, told the Branch manager about me and about an hour or two later she came into the cafeteria where I was sitting and said "My shift is done soon and when I leave we won't have a Mission Control for this evening. Kim [the centre manager at the time] said to show you what to do and let you be M.C. for the evening." So for 15 minutes Shannon tried to show me what I was supposed to do for the evening and then she left. Later they told me that the problems that night were some of the worst they had had since the centre opened, and by the time of my telephone interview later that evening to corporate head quarters Salt Lake City, Utah, I was feeling very overwhelmed and much like a chicken with its head cut of.

But I must have acquitted myself well because Chad, the person in charge of hiring me, told me that the interview was just a formality since I had proven I could do the job even after getting thrown to the wolves. I ended up working 55 hours that week, coming in early so that I would be there at the same time that Shannon was (her shift ended about 2 hours before min began) so she could show me what I was supposed to be doing. But I was glad — I was off the phones!

About three weeks earlier, the evening M.C. had come into my training class to fix some computer problem — so originally I had thought that Mission Control was the IT department. Ironically, I had said to him "I want your job". :-)

But it's not IT, not really. Mission Control's area of responsibility is basically making sure that the agents on the phones can continue to take calls smoothly and use the various software tools for that and for accessing the customers' accounts. To do that you need to know some systems administration stuff but there is an actual IT person who takes care of the LAN. Mission Control is also the liasion between the local centre and Sprint's über-Mission Control in Kansas City and the other TeleperformanceUSA centres running SprintPCS traffic. This is so Sprint can send out real-time directives to the centres and because problems which affect one centre can often end up affecting all centres.

All in all, even though the new position wasn't quite what I thought it was when I handed in that internal job bid on the last day of learning lab, it is something that I like far more than I would have felt about being on the phones. I am glad I have it.

On August 16th I started a new job with Marusa Marketing Inc, a subsidary of TelePerformance USA, providing inbound call support for an American cell-phone service provider. After four weeks of in-class training tonight was the first night of actually taking calls.

And I survived.

These next two weeks are called learning lab where we're to get used to taking calls and ramp up to production expecteations.

Obviously I can't can't give too many details (confidential customer data and all that), so suffice it to say it wasn't as bad as I expected. I knew how to do most of what I wanted to do, though I did have to ask a number of questions but the only real problem I had was something that even my supervisor could not fix, so I don't feel too badly about that.

Part of the job is up-selling, or, in internal corporate lingo: MAXimizing. It's where I say to the caller something like "I notice you've got this snazzy phone would you like to get the Internet package - I can give that to you free for the first bit to try it out." In the one hand we're told that we're not supposed to pressure the customer but on the otherhand we're told to try and overcome their objections. I've never worked in sales and I'm strill trying to wrap my brain around this dichotomy.

The production expectation is a MAXimize offer rate of 85% (i.e. making an up-sell offer 8 or 9 times out of ten) and a success rate on MAXimizing of once per hour or ~8 times per shift or about 1 success every 10 calls. The first part, merely making the offers, that I can handle even though I kept forgetting to do so until after ther customer had hung up. The actual success rate is something that has me anxious because of the previously mentioned dichotomy. If I'm expected to have minimum number of successful MAXimizes every day, to me that says that some pressure is used. Because how else do you overcome customer objections? And if it is supposed to be no pressure then how can I guarantee that I will get this minimum number of successful MAXimizes? We're told to think of it as customer education, but to me changing the name doesn't change the reality.

Like I said, I survived to today. Things weren't as bad as I had feared but neither can I say this was a good day. I can only work on remembering to make offers more often, pray that I will get used to doing this and hope that making enough offers will result in the minimum of successes simply through volume.