Incompetence

A culture of incompetence pervades Cablevision. Everywhere you look there are idiots and the idiots beget idiots.

From the HR managers that hire techs that can barely spell their name, to the trainers that couldn't train someone to tie their shoes, to the retread former Verizon supervisors (there's a good reason why Verizon dumped them) to the clueless morons in the networking groups, incompetence is everywhere.

Techs
I feel sorry for our customers, there might be a 25% chance they will speak with a tech that will be able to help them. Because Cablevision pays so little (you start as a temp making $11/hr) and this is a job that takes you a couple of months to really get into the flow of things, you rarely get techs that 1) are technically proficient when they walk in the door and 2) stick around to become so. For the new tech, Cablevision has a wonderful support structure, there is always someone around to help. HAHAHAHAHA. As I've detailed before in Managements obsession, any tech or lead that should be available to help new techs get ordered to or are scheduled to be on the phones. How do these techs learn from their mistakes? They don't. Since they don't know they are making mistakes and Management doesn't care about the quality of the tech support, they will just keep making the same mistakes over and over again. BUT! Even though the odds say you will have to call in 3 more times before you get someone that can help you, at least be happy for the call center management because you are helping them get their year end bonus.

Training
I don't know what these guys are doing all day because the new techs come out of training almost as clueless as when they come in. Simple little tasks like determining if a customer is part of an outage is beyond them. Forget about trying to diagnose a Winsock problem. New techs get a couple of weeks of classroom training, followed by a day or two listening in with an experienced tech and then they are put on the phones. Training should be at least 6 weeks long. Two weeks in class, one week sitting with an experienced tech listening and discussing the calls, one week taking the calls and having the experienced tech discuss their approach and coach them and then two weeks on the phone with a trainer close by to monitor their tickets and answer any questions. Management will never do this as all they care about are bodies on the phone. They don't care about properly training their techs, they don't care about proper customer service, they simply care about answering as many calls as quickly as possible. Is my approach a better long term solution? Of course, but as I've stated before, it won't help Management make their numbers and thus their precious year end bonus.

Supervisors
In the past year, we have been inundated with former Verizon supervisors. Cablevision's incompetent management would rather hire retreads than promote from within. They've probably hired 10 supervisors from Verizon in the past year and promoted maybe 3 people from within. As a result, the technical abilities of these supervisors are nil. Techs are told to See a lead or supervisor if you have any questions. If your tech puts you on hold to ask one of these Verizon supervisors a question, you'd have been better off had he just used a Magic 8 Ball

Field Techs
The majority of Field Techs are excellent. They come to your house, do a great job and you are happy. BUT! We don't hear about them, nobody calls in to tell us what a great job Jose did when he installed their triple play. We hear the horror stories, of untrained techs (sound familiar?), botched jobs, and rushed incomplete jobs. And when that happens, the customers that call in are PISSED. And for good reason. I hate these calls, all you can do is kiss some ass because you KNOW we fucked up and when you schedule a repair you pray it will be assigned to a good tech. What you really want to do is go to the customer's house, fix his problem and then track down the Field tech and kick his lazy incompetent ass. There are two types of Field techs, Cablevision techs and contractors. Because of the explosive growth of Optimum Voice, as well as the Triple Play promotion, Cablevision cannot handle the volume of installs and repair calls and must hire contractors. 99% of the problem installs are because of Idiot Contractors that don't know WTF they are doing. Next time you have a tech come to your house, just hope to look out the window and see a real Cablevision truck. If you don't, well, good luck......

The BISC
These are the guys who run the mail servers. If you are masochistic enough to use an @optonline.net address, you know where this is going. These guys love performing unplanned maintenances in the middle of the day and bringing down a mail server. Of course their excuse is It isn't customer affecting. Oh no? Then why do we have 100 angry customers in the queue because they cannot get their email? Also the mail servers crap out for no apparent reason at all and the first indication the BISC has of this is a phone call telling them about it! There are something like 10 mail stores, each email address is assigned a mail store. Why doesn't the BISC have 10 email address, each on a different mail store and a program that every minute tries to log into each email address in turn? If one fails, set off an alarm or something. I know guys that can write a program to do this in minutes. This is basic, simple stuff! Why isn't it done? Incompetence, plain and simple incompetence.

RFDN
These idiots are responsible for running the UBRs. They are real winners. Let's roll out an untested IOS upgrade for this Cisco UBR and wait for call volume to see if it works!. When the calls come rolling in, they deny there is a problem on their end, constantly duck the issue, do everything they can to stall and finally when pressed to the wall with an overwhelming amount of evidence that there is a problem, take some action. Of course this is probably 12 hours later, thousands of customers have been affected and the issue is guaranteed to occur again because they didn't fix the problem they just masked it. And that is on an issue that affects thousands! Imagine trying to get them to fix a smaller issue on their end. Forget it.

All in all, If I have to decide among all the above, it's a close call between the moron field tech contractors and the idiots at RFDN. But in my final analysis, the group that wins the Incompetence award are the knuckleheads in RFDN.