I was recently laid-off by IBM. There were two of us left (from prior lay-offs) in our department.
One of us (ME) received many customer letters of appreciation, constantly received notifications of "very satisfied" customer surveys, worked my tail off to see that every customer was satisfied and that work was performed quickly, and completely. On the down side, I tended to be late with my paperwork like customer billing.
The other technician had received numerous customer complaints over the years. Customers commented on a regular basis about how arrogant and rude he was. He strung out repairs unneccesarily over several days. He ordered wrong parts, causing service delays.in other words he was a complete disaster as a technician. But... He was a paperwork* fiend who loved to stay up nights, on his own time even, doing customer billing and any other kind of reporting and paperwork you can imagine.
Guess which employee IBM chose to keep. Not the one who is dedicated to customer service excellence. They chose to keep the one who is dedicated to getting the QSARs (They drive the billing process) done quickly. I was told (off the record) that he was chosen because he "does his paperwork like clockwork." Never mind that the way he accomplished this was to get up early and stay up late to do the paperwork on his own time. The reason I was often late with paperwork was that we really were not given enough time in the workday to get the actual service work done, plus the paperwork. As an hourly employee, I refused to work off-the-clock and I guess this was my downfall.
Yes, in a way, It's my own fault that I lost my job. If I had been a paperwork nut like my partner, I would probably be the one still working for Big Blue. But I am just a bit bitter about losing my job when I was the one who cared more about the customers and about doing a good job.
So my point is just to let people know that IBM hires and keeps technicians who are good accountants and awful service providers while they lay-off technicians who are more technically proficient and better at driving customer satisfaction. Next time you have a bad service experience with IBM, maybe this will help explain.
* When I say "paperwork" this is really mostly online entry.
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