Working for West Telemaraketing for 3 years and 11 months I saw all of the corruption and favoritism that goes on within the working enviroment. I started with outbound sales for AT&T and ended up doing inbound customer service for Cingular. The last project that I was on was altogether hectic because we were only given 2 weeks to learn all the information and computer systems that new employees would get 4-6 weeks in training to learn. The excuse that management gave us is that we were veteran employees on a similar project for inbound AT&T wireless and we were converting to full Cingular wireless representatives so we were expected to learn the material. Yeah right it seems to me like an excuse to not pay correctly for training.
That did not seem like a sufficient excuse only for the reason that there was 4 times as much information to learn for the new Cingular systems and policies. Well that kind of sucks because we were not given any leiway and still stepped (written up) for any errors that were made on the floor for the new project that we were trained on and barely learning. Well it seemed that the majority of the employees that were trained for 2 weeks for the Cingular project just kept disappearing. Alot of them quit because they could not take the pressures of the new systems, new information and new policies that we were never taught or properly trained to know. This is only the start to a crappy work enviroment.
Another topic being the lack of assigned headsets. It is unsanitary and inhumane. We were never assigned individual headsets and were expected to wipe off greasy headsets with sanitary wipes at the start of our shift. Who knows what kind of viruses could be in those headsets because of all the different individuals that share them. That is pretty discusting / there is also no spongy wrist wrests to keep your wrists rested for an eight hour shift. I would say that half of the chairs were broken and did properly support your back properly.
Well to get back to the point of this consumer complaints. I was on the Cingular project for a couple of months and my supervisor was on my back because people would call in hang up or just call back to confirm information that I had previously given them and I would get written up for it. There was a number of repeat calls from customer that would call back before previously speaking with me. First off, I was later explained that I could call them back if the call drops and that I was never told either in training or on the floor because most of the supervisors or helpers that would be helping would just tell us to look in our system to get the information. But how can we get that information of we get call after call as soon as we are logged into our systems. Does ot make sense either if we want to keep our handle time down about an average of 550 seconds: which is what they wanted our handle times at. Does not make sense!
We'll I was switched to a different supervisor and he would be my last working at this corrupt business. His name is Ryan and I only got negative feedback from him towards me since I was first switched to his team. The reason I was switched to him was because my old Team Leader was changed to the AT&T Wireless project. Dont know why, so dont ask me. Well, this supervisor Ryan is an first class suckup and idiot. He would try to play the friend friend game on the floor but I never fell for it. He's the biggest fake because why would he try to play he was your friend when he gave me a step 3 for attendace the first or second week of being on his team. Well if you dont know a step 3 as they call it is the previous written warning before an agent gets terminated. Well the system they have is not very accurate even if ou signe up for hours. I was told that If you are scheduled for 30 hours because a co-worker took your hours and you added 10 extra hours of someone elses schedule it wont count towards your adherence. That is stupid because you are still working those hours and I think it is a load of bull.
I finally managed my schedule and managed to have that step three go away because I went past a 90 day probation period. I was however stepped for call quality scoring because of ridiculous mandatory repititous confimation script that we had to say or do at the end of every call. Let me mention that the call quality procedures changed about 4 or 5 times while I was on the Cingular project becuase the Client (Cingular) request. That is bull because I have Cingular service and non of the customer service representatives have never said any of the required bull crap that we were required to say while we were taking calls for West. My theory is because since West gets business from Cingular they are preety much their bitch because they have to over impress the client to keep their contracts. That is bull in my opinion but I don't even think that is the reason for me getting termed at that sheister business. It was just a supervisor that had something against me. Hey maybe he's racist or something because he is cockasian and I am hispanic. I try to not think of tat stuff but it is hard to not to when you think it is happening to you. One of the reasons I say that is because one of the people at the podium asked me to help the newer people taking calls with questions they might have. I would do that once in a while when I was asked to help. I was later told to sit down and take calls because Ryan (my tema leader) told the person at podium to sit me down. That is bull man, why was this only happening to me. Well It did exceed as he would step me for call quality. I was trying very hard to say all the crap that they wanted us to say even if I think its unnecessary information that we were told to say. Well he listened to my calls and my scores kept falling because he said that I did not say things but I was so sure that I was covering everything. Of course he never let me listen to my calls even if I did request to listen to them. I ended up going to Human Resources and the lady at call quality just blew me off. She called me and pressured me to tell her exactly when these occurences happened. Good thing I was writing everything down as they were happening. I did asked her to switch me to another Team Leader but she refused. The reason she gave me was that he had expectations. Yeah right I had listened to other peoples calls and they never even said 2 things of the info. That I was told we had to say. A week later I was put on a step four which is automatic termination. I did not even contest it because I was tired of all the bull shit and stress that I had to go through every day at that place. I want everyone to know not to work for this sheister company because it has a poor management and organization. I am a web administrator and will maybe put up a future website to let eveyone know about this.
Careful with this company, they really suck the life out of you.
Steve
El Paso, Texas
U.S.A.
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