Alde’s Stuff

So, I work for a large company with a rather big call center, including off-shore partners, as honestly, people won’t pay the money to get 100% on-shore support, especially for the idiots we are able to hire at the exhorbanent prices due to our location.

Last month, after being told by a technician dispatched to my house that I was lucky my DSL modem got sync as how far I was from the Central Office, and that most likely it was a wet pair, i.e. every time it rains it gets wet and causes the modem to lose sync.

Bundled that with Verizon billing me $5 more a month ($40 a month) for 1.5meg DSL, and my contract being up, I was ditching Verizon for a cable modem. I hate the cable companies, but at least for my $43, I’d get more than 1.5megs.

So, on the 14th of July, I cancelled my account with Verizon. Told the retention agent, no, I’m not interested in a free month, I am no longer need DSL. I might come back when you have FIOS, but you suck, I’m firing you.

I was told by the retention agent that my account was canceled, and my account would be updated and I’d get a pro-rated charge for the 7 days of the month I still had service.

‘lo and behold, when my August bill showed up, I got the free month and my account was not cancelled. Hooray call center agent!

Now that I work with 1000+ call center agents, with another 300-500 off-shored agents, I know excatly what the agent did, and why.

See, call center agent is a suck ass job. First line tech support sucks so bad as a job, every company (basically) off-shores this part. Why? No one will work for that wage and deal with the idiots that call in. So, at my work, tier 2 tech, advanced tech support, some sales, and retention are all housed in the US.

So, the retention agent job sucks as well. At least with the other tech support jobs, you get a satisfaction in troubleshooting a problem and generally delighting the customer. However, for these jobs, you need some computer saavyness, and the ability to troubleshoot advanced issues dealing with problems you will not have a script for.

The retention agent job sucks in that every person you talk to is on the phone to fire you as a company. It’s almost as bad as cold-call sales. So to get people into the job, they provide probably the highest per-hour wage (other than the advanced/tier3 tech support jobs), with a bonus based upon your “save” rate, or the rate at which you are able to convince customers to not cancel their service.

So, the unscrupulous agent (i.e. the agent that for the most part will not have a job soon) to boost their numbers, will tell the customer that they’re cancelled, but “save” them in the system, so it’s put off onto another agent next month. The “Retention Shuffle”.

I had once thought Verizon to be a company of impecable technical support and service, I realize that they are just like every crappy company out there and therefore, I no longer put them in that class of “enlightened” customer service companies.

Sorry for you, Verizon. You’ve been fired, even if you’ve tried a corrupt way to keep my account, I’m going to get the (unfortunate) pleasure of firing you again…After 47 minutes on hold, to talk to an agent who may (or may not) cancel my account… Again.