Statistics

Have you ever felt rushed off the phone like the tech is just blowing you off? Have you been told you were in an outage but called later to find out you weren’t? Has a tech ever referred you to a router/OS/PC vendor when the actual problem was on our side? Has a tech ever hung up on you “accidentally” after about 10 minutes? It might not have been incompetence, it may have been the need for the tech to meet management’s unreasonable goals.

As stated in a previous post, the holy grail of management is the call center’s ASA, or Average Speed of Answer. EVERYTHING the tech does affects the ASA so management watch the techs like a hawk. As soon as you walk in the door, management has you under a microscope. Even the time you spend taking a dump is recorded. And any deviation from their specs are met with a heavy hand.

When your shift starts you sign into your phone and you immediately start to Idle. Idle is bad. Very, very bad. Too much Idle time and you will feel the iron fist of management. But you need time to log into your PC and then start up and sign into the 10 applications you need to do your job. Lucky for us we have a special code we can put in the phone that allows us Sign In time. Don’t go over 5 minutes though! Of course management only implemented that sign in time after a class action lawsuit was settled. Before that you had to be at your desk, and signed in (which takes about 10 minutes) BEFORE YOUR SHIFT STARTED. When your shift started you had better be ready to take a call immediately (or feel the iron fist). That this was wrong was brought up numerous times to management, but they ignored it until the lawsuit was filed.

Now you are signed in, management is watching carefully. Your entire day consists of idle time,call Time,hold time and wrap time. Call time is the amount of time you spend on the call with the customer. Hold time is the time the customer spends on hold. Wrap time is the time after the customer hangs up and before you hit the Ready button to take another call.

Management is oh so generous with breaks, for an 8.5 hour shift, we get two 15 minutes breaks and a 30 (unpaid) minute lunch. THE ABSOLUTE MINIMUM REQUIRED BY LAW. Yep, along with those crappy-ass monitors, Cablevision never fails to go the extra mile for us techs!!!

Let’s not forget personal time. Again management shows their generosity by allowing us a whopping 8 minutes of personal time. So, you've got an upset stomach today and have to use the bathroom frequently or take too long doing so? Or take a couple of quick cigarette breaks? Don't worry, you’ll hear about it and it will affect you at raise time. Once, I was sick and took a while in the bathroom. A supervisor actually sent a lead to find me. They weren't concerned about my health, they were concerned I was away from my desk for 10 minutes.

But management is most concerned with Call Time,hold time and wrap time. Those are the most important numbers when it comes to your evaluation. Management’s Call time goal is 9 minutes and 30 seconds. Although I’ve heard from a lying sack of shit manager that this stat does not affect your rating, I’ll believe that when a flock of pigeons fly out of my ass.

Management is very short sighted about Call time. As a competent responsible tech, I’d rather answer all the customer’s questions, and spend the extra time to avoid them calling back. As an example, a customer wants to setup his email for himself and his wife. A tech drinking the management kool-aid would setup the customer’s email in Outlook Express and then tell the customer to do the same thing he did and setup his wife’s email himself. Of course this customer will call back after being unable to figure out what to do. Although the tech met management’s goal for his call time, he created an extra call for the customer. Even worse are the techs (encouraged by some supervisors), that just tell the customer to use Webmail. OOL is a POP shop, it is not IMAP. Email is designed to be temporarily held on the OOL servers, there is no backup, no disaster recovery and you know how I feel about the BISC. DO NOT USE WEBMAIL AS YOUR PRIMARY EMAIL ACCESS!!!

Techs are setup to fail when it comes to the other stats, hold time and wrap time. These goals (30 seconds each) were instituted long before OV. They may have been reasonable when you only had OOL calls but they are unrealistic for OV calls. First of all, we have the issue of the lack of available leads or floor walkers covered previously . The longer it takes to get your questions answered, the longer your hold time is. And OV calls often require you to put the customer on hold and verify the problem by calling other numbers. This may also require a walk to the Comm Desk to use some of the special phones there (Simplifying things, if a customer is in a 973 area code and is having problems calling 973 numbers you can use one of the 973 area code phones at the Comm Desk. If you are doing your job correctly, there is no way in hell you can keep your hold under 30 seconds.

Wrap time is one of the most problematic of all the stats. Management expects us to be able to detail everything about a call as we are talking to the customer. This is why when you say something to a tech, he pauses, you hear typing in the background and then he may ask you another question or ask you to clarify or repeat your statement. But there are a number of issues that cannot be resolved on the phone, they might have to be escalated. In that case, you get all the info from the customer and then after they hang up, you have to document all the customers details into the ticket you are escalating. Or you might have to fill out a web form with about 20 different pieces of info. In a competent company you might think all these tools are linked and can talk to each other, but we are speaking about Cablevision.. Everything is cut and paste. One big problem with techs needing to match the Wrap time is that they skimp on the details in the ticket or even just blow off escalating it. Even worse are the techs that don't bother to save a ticket. No ticket means no wrap time! So if you ever call in and the tech tells you there is no record that you called before this may be the reason why. Having a short wrap time encourages techs to be brief on their documentation and that will hinder the next tech if you call in again, he will have to start from scratch with you.

But the statistic that weighs the most on a tech's performance has nothing to do with being technical or even the success of a tech with your problem. It is concerned only with how the customer is spoken to. Next to their precious ASA, this is what Management pays the most attention. That's right, they don't care if the tech helps you, they just care that the tech speaks the proper phrases. It's called BPA and I'll cover it another day.

With these "goals", management is thinking they are running an efficient call center but if you look deeper at true customer service you see that results do not match the numbers. Management is simply shooting themselves in the foot.

But why should they want to reduce calls? Fewer calls mean less staff means less responsibility which means a smaller bonus. It is in management's best interest (and thus the tech's) to have a customer call in 3 times over 3 days for <10 minutes each at different times of the day instead of having 1 30 minute call. Less call time, less wrap time and less hold time. It's the Cablevision way, everyone wins but the customer......