A letter fired off to AT&T CEO Randal Stephenson:
Mr. Stephenson,
I am writing you this letter because I am concerned about the state of affairs in the call center I am employed. I started with Bellsouth Mobility many years ago and have worked hard and put every bit of myself into the jobs I am expected to perform. Throughout the years of my employment, I've seen many changes take place and I've accepted these changes with a smile. Today my smile is gone and not because of external life circumstances. Every day I walk into the call center, a new event takes place and the world around me crumbles. I know this sounds a bit dramatic, but for eight hours five days weekly, my world is my co-workers and customers I interact with. My co-workers are miserable and I am miserable. And with the recent changes, now our customers are miserable. Let me explain why we are all miserable.
Our call center encompasses several jobs, and this is how I've known things to operate for many years. It's exciting to work for a call center where there are other facets of the job one can explore. I've always loved telecommunications. To break the call center down in its most basic capacities, I can say that we handle two operations for AT&T: Porting Activations and Chat Support. Porting has been with this call center since its inception in 2004. Our director has an online team of employees and an offline team of employees for the Porting Activations department. The head count has lowered over the past few years because the porting process has been streamlined with software that can handle the transitioning with automated precision. Since the stream-lining has gotten even better, our center director has moved a lot of the online employees to the offline jobs. The offline employees handle any fallout from the porting process. And since other call centers are involved in handling porting issues, the volume of porting calls is at its lowest, thus the fallout has lessened. The other side of our call center houses our chatting team. The chat team was put together, for the most part, by Mr. Tom Brogan, former call center director (now retired). His department was formally technical support on a national level, handling complicated switch errors to the uncomplicated general support of troubleshooting device issues. Mr. Brogan liked to be addressed as Tom, so I will refer to him as Tom from this point. Tom was eager to set his department up on a pedestal above others. He regarded his people as a group and encouraged his group to interact and learn from each other. His people admired him greatly because they knew that in Tom they could confide and trust. When I say trust, I refer to the fact that we all knew there were other call centers ready to equip with jobs and Tom made it known that when we lost a job function for his department, he would work hard to find us another, and we always seemed to exceed expectations, all receiving high marks from customer letters to meetings of acknowledgement of a job well done. Our morale was high then. I am letting you know about some of our history so you will be able to later contrast the differences between then and now.
Since Tom's retirement in 2010, our new call center director has taken his department into a different direction, and not for the good. We always heard rumor that Tom Brogan was being forced into retirement and that the other call center director, Beth Hendrickson, was eager to take over so that her head count could increase, providing her additional pay and bonuses. I am not one who condones rumor, but for the purpose of my letter to you, it is apropos to mention opinion with fact. The fact is that when Beth Hendrickson took over the entire call center, she made it known immediately that her way of doing things was much different than the way Tom handled his affairs. When Tom left, our chat support was still new because the software changed several times and stream-lining the process of handling technical support could not be as streamlined as taking a porting call. Technical issues come in a vast assortment, where the issue(s) are entirely with the customer's device, or the issue(s) are not as simple and perhaps require attention to both the network and customer's device interaction, to entirely a network issue. As network issues occur often, sometimes we are the first line of defense and the customer requires us to file a network ticket to gather attention from our network engineers. As you may not know, this process of filing a ticket is unjustly time consuming and takes the average representative 12-15 minutes. Then, when it is time to submit the ticket, we are bombarded with a listing of over 200 departments to dispatch the ticket. On chance that the ticket did make it to the correct queue, one will eventually see their ticket come back to them with an email carbon copy sent to their manager. The manager will then schedule an appointment to meet with them regarding why the ticket was sent back. Tickets are sent back for mundane reasons, in most cases. This allows the person working the ticket to expunge their responsibility for seeing the issue to resolution. If they send the ticket back, they no longer have to deal with the issue. I am giving you an example of one of the job functions we perform on chat so you will have a general idea of how long an interaction with a customer can be aside from just the expected chat flow which include the customer greeting and acknowledgement of the issue, the verification of the customer's account, accessing the account, reading the notes on the account, investigating the issue, and noting the account.
Since Beth Henrickson and her group of area managers have taken over, we have seen so many changes that it is almost impossible to discern company policy from local call center propaganda and outright lies. In December of 2010 it was communicated to the chat department that AT&T is expecting our small department to handle the chat flow of thousands of wireless customers. To adequately handle this flow, it is expected of us to take two chats at a time. Our managers communicated with us that AT&T likes to "do more with less" and boy have we seen this philosophy in action. In November of 2010, our department was labeled "Total Care" and we were expected to take on all issues, encouraged to take on as many chats as possible. We were juggling billing issues, network technical issues, phone software issues, international usage issues, order support, and general customer service. Beth Hendrickson and her area managers would dole out orders that were relayed to our managers who would then cover this information in our weekly meeting huddles (when we had them). Our responsibilities were increasing, the metrics we were expected to abide were unrealistic, and our handle times to properly assist our customers while attempting to uphold great customer service was well beyond the maximum "allowed" per chat. Let me emphasize with clarity that our small department was not trained adequately to handle customers as concerns six different job functions. When this news was dumped into our laps, we all were overwhelmed and unsupported by upper management. We all begged for the training and support that it would take to prepare us for this large scale operation. We were given three days of training for billing and then thrown to the sharks. This was all a big joke as far as the chat employees were concerned. We had few people in our group who were assigned to be our floor support and they were mostly all new people who management felt comfortable with. While management felt comfortable with their floor support, we were all sinking. LeAnne Priebe comes to our rescue, or so we think.
Ms. Priebe announced her job function and goals in an email. We read this email with a genuine feel of enlightenment, all believing Ms. Priebe would make sure we had the training we needed to not only do our jobs well, but to make our customers our first priority. When Ms. Priebe announced she would be visiting our call center, our upper management made strides to assign a group of employees to offline projects, such as coloring wall decorations to cleaning desks, adding speed bumps in the parking lot, and getting the grounds keepers to give the outside a makeover. Houseplants on the upper management office cubicle ledges were removed and we were all told to be observant of our company and stay busy. Low and behold, Beth Henrickson and her area managers were all ready for their company and ready to put on a happy face, touring Ms. Priebe through the call center. I was there the day Ms. Priebe visited. Ms. Priebe was ushered around and visited with some employees, but not without Beth's presence. There were several employees who wanted to tell Ms. Priebe how things were really going in the center, but whistle blowers are not tolerated in this call center. If you have a tiff with the way things are run, you can either keep your mouth shut or you can tell management and be retaliated against and lose your job. Before Ms. Priebe left our center, a union steward handed her a note. In this note contained useful information - information that could have been used to the company's advantage, to find out what things are really going on behind the scenes. As far as the note concerns, it is a fact that many of these items of concern in this note were not and still haven't been addressed.
One particular item of interest is Beth Hendrickson's expectations of complying with company policy. However, it has always been my contention that examples are set and followed if said examples follow their own expectations. This has obviously been overlooked by Ms. Hendrickson, who has, on many occasions, fired people for accessing their own account or had worked on a friend's or family member's account. In December of 2010, Ms. Hendrickson not only showed flaw in her role as call center director, but also in her general character. She had her husband, who is also an AT&T employee in another call center, chat in with one of our employees to work with his account. As if this isn't an apparent conflict of interest, he didn't have a pleasant interaction with our chat representative. In fact, he called his wife to let her know that he was not happy with what was transpiring and his wife, our call center director came out to the floor to prop herself over the employee and ask the employee what was going on. Ms. Hendrickson then told the employee what to do and propped herself aside the employee against the cubicle desk drawers and stayed there until the chat interaction was complete. We all heard about this. We all saw that the employee who was unfortunate enough to work on Ms. Hendrickson's husband's account was distraught and confused. The ethics hotline was called and we found out later that this entire incident was covered up, Ms. Hendrickson escaping what would have been the demise of one of our jobs if it had been one of us. It was unfair, and the events following are unfair, unjust, constitute customer abuse, and tread on some fine legal line.
Since Ms. Priebe has come to our call center, our management has had many roundtable sessions with Beth and her area managers. We don't get offered a lot of information coming from these meetings except for what management can now dole out to us next. Our weekly huddle sessions used to cover useful tidbits for our job functions and interesting company information. These meetings have now dwindled down to why we aren't meeting expected goals and reading useless communications seemingly to take up the time allotted for the meetings. We used to have time to read over our emails and complete a huddle agenda quiz that would help us learn more about changing policies and procedures. These emails are still sent, but we have no time to read the information that has been prepared for us, so it really is a waste of company resources to have a Methods & Procedures department prepare this information and send it out weekly. I suppose the emails are CC'd to upper management, justifying their job, but sincerely, a waste of money as we are all expected to sign into our chats within three minutes of signing in for the day. I'd like to say that what Ms. Priebe, Steve Sutton, Ralph DeLaVega and Randall Stephenson send out in emails is read and implemented, but in all honesty, most of us just delete these emails or file them away in our archives. It's not that we don't want to be on top of our game and know what our company expects, it's just that our call center director and area managers see things in a different light and we are not in tune with what our company wants. We are expected to be in tune with what Ms. Hendrickson wants.
More recently, our management has notified us that Ms. Hendrickson has established that Ms. Priebe is numbers oriented. This contradicts what I've read from Ms. Priebe. Ms. Priebe wants to give us the title of "trusted adviser". Ms. Priebe has told us that the ultimate goal is to make sure our customer is treated with respect and their issues resolved in as few transactions as possible, meaning a one call resolution. Since Ms. Priebe's visit to our center, we were advised that we are no longer Total Care advisers but we are still expected to take on any issue that comes our way in a chat. If we don't take on the issue, we will be disciplined. This still sounds like we are Total Care. We were absolved of taking on two chats at once for a brief time and told to take an extra chat when we could. Our chat software is not user friendly for taking a second chat. When we go to take another chat, we had to click on a button which would time out our chat session briefly and would expand a long list of customers waiting to chat. When we accepted the chat, the chat session timed out again causing a delay in handling our first chat interaction. Today, we are still using the same flawed software, but once again, we were told last week that it will be expected of us to take two chats on a consistent basis from here on out. We started this today, again. But it is much worse than you can imagine.
Beth has now fired and lost over 20 of our chat employees, bringing in a mere 15 people from her porting department. So we are five less than what we were in December of 2010 and we have a lot of new people who are scared to death every day they come in. For the length of my employment with AT&T, I always understood that the "quality" of the interaction with our customers was scored with significance. At the present time, our quality metric makes up 70 percent of our score. Other things such as average handle time, concurrent chats, and "operator utilization" make up the remainder of our score. However, Beth has advised us that AT&T is expecting our average handle time, concurrent chats, and operator utilization to increase quickly, or our jobs are on the line. It has been communicated to us that AT&T likes to do more with less, and this is being emphasized every day now. We've been told that Beth is trying to fight to keep the chat function in our call center. I honestly don't know why. She does not encourage her chat employees. Instead, she treats them with ill regard, she never frequents the floor to speak with any of us like we are humans. Instead, she has elected an offline porting specialist to walk the call center floor from aisle to aisle taking note of infractions and people talking to each other. We no longer have a medium to communicate with our employees. We have limited training on the phones we offer and we have very limited support by our managers. If we have a computer problem, we are expected to sign out into a special queue so we can file a ticket which will be dispatched to an IT group in India, will then pass the buck until an escalation needs to take place for the same issue, and eventually our IT guy will come to the floor and pull the computer and replace with another. In the chat department, we are assigned desks, so if our computer is down, so are we, but our metrics suffer. Our metrics are what label us a good employee or a bad employee.
So today, we are a department suffering with a limited head count and thousands of customers waiting to chat with us, meanwhile on the other side of our call center are online and offline employees receiving emails to go home early because the volume of porting calls and port fallout doesn't constitute the hours worked. Beth has managed to keep her availability numbers high, but not too high to warrant the loss of any more employees. I know this is a smart business tactic, but it also doesn't make sense to have a representative paid hourly to walk the floor proactively seeking out trouble while there is a fully staffed management team. Recently, we've been told that if our chat department cannot handle the flow of customers (taking two chats at a time), we could lose our department, having it outsourced to a country where chat can be staffed paying less than half of what our American representatives are paid. Also recently, management has taken note of the sour economy and have told us all that we should be happy we have jobs. I am happy I have a job. I'm not happy that my job is demeaned every day with remarks from management telling us that we must maintain quality while adhering to unrealistic chat handle times and concurrent chats. I will break down the structure of what it is like to take two chats at once.
Chat comes in with the statement "My phone is freezing after installing the new operating system and I don't know what to do, can you help?". We must acknowledge the customer's issue within one minute and then verify their account with the account holder's name, last four digits of the account holder's social security number, or account passcode if the customer has one. After we verify our customer, we must ask questions to pursue the issue and gather details to determine what is causing the issue. Meanwhile, while we are verifying the account and haven't addressed the substance of the chat another chat comes in. We must then acknowledge this customer's issue within one minute, verify their account, and gather information. We are expected to update the customer within three minutes of our last statement to the customer. If we do not get back with the customer within three minutes and if this chat is scored by our managers or the QA group based out of India, we automatically lose 40 points out of a possible of 100 points for this chat. We are observed on four chats per month - two from our manager and two from the QA group in India. If we lose 40 points on one chat, we have failed the chat. We can also lose 25 points for two or more mis*****ed words in a chat session, another failed chat because we must score an 85 or better to pass the chat. The real substance of the chat is not observed as much though. We have very limited control over a lot of issues that come to us in a chat, so if we pay attention to the semantics of what our managers and QA are expecting to see, we can get away easily from resolving the customer's issue so long as we've come back to our customer within three minutes and haven't mis*****ed any words. So, in essence, our quality is a number negated by concurrent chats and average handle times. We can't spend too much time with a customer, so we are forced to either shuffle the customer on or lie to our customer.
The point I am making is that we are not doing our jobs for the good of the customer, we are meeting numbers for our call center director. Our call center director has one interest and it is clearly not to exploit our talents as skilled representatives, it is a puppy mill to pass the customer through and take another. Our managers are meeting with us more each week, not to discuss our progress but to discuss ways we can improve. If all our call center is wanting is better numbers, then why is quality scored at 70 percent and discounted when we meet our customers' expectations but it took too long to get it done? It's confusing to us because it has been pounded into our heads how important it is for a one call or one chat resolution and yet when we strive to be the best our company employs, we are demoralized with not meeting Beth's numbers. Each year, JD Powers and Associates reviews and scores communications companies. I understand that rating low in their scores can have an effect on potential customers and our company. With sincerity, our call center seems removed from AT&T's ideals and visions. In our call center, we are separate from others in the company, and we feel that way too. We don't feel like we are part of AT&T, we feel like we are numbers. As long as our numbers are in line with what Beth considers good, I suppose we keep our jobs and continue to function, but not like we wish to function. We want to assist our customers and go home feeling like we are part of the bigger picture that AT&T is. We see commercials on television that remind us just how big AT&T is, but we can't feel big. We feel detached.
And as it pertains to the T-mobile merger, I'd like to say we are excited to gain over 34 million additional customers, but that is not how we view the news in our call center. We already feel that we are short-changing our present customers. We can't imagine the addition of 34 million additional customers, which will greatly impact our chat volumes only making us resent the fact that we are pushing more through the queues. It's the fact that we are not only incapable at present to handle more chats, we are exhausted, frustrated, confused, lethargic, and bullied to the point we know we are unwilling to take on a heavier load. If you are wondering what life is like in our call center, talk to our employees, but come in unannounced. If Beth and her crew know company is coming, they will be prepared to walk you through an artificial existence. If you want to know why customer service is dismal and why we don't rank on the top of JD Powers and Associates survey, come into our abode and we will tell you why. Sit with a few of us and watch how confused our employees are, watch our customers angrily leave our chats, threatening to go to our competition. My opinion is, I don't know how we will take on the new responsibility of so many more customers. It's scary when we haven't been trained on the majority of our phones and network changes, being coined "Trusted Adviser" and rushing to take on our next two chats at a time.
I ask you to keep this email from our call center director and to visit us. We will welcome you with open arms. We need a change desperately. If Beth and her crew won't come out of their offices, perhaps you can visit them in their offices to ask them why.
Mr. Stephenson, I implore you to take this letter into consideration and know that I am a concerned employee and hope you truly think of what IS possible.
Kind regards,
Concerned AT&T Cedartown, Georgia call center employee
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