stepford csr

we are trying to create stepford csr's in my work place. this is to say, we have outlined what we expect from them to such a degree, there is little room for the individual or the thoughtful agent.

• at the beginning of their inbound calls, our stepford csr's must introduce themself and the company and offer assistance in a friendly and upbeat manner.
• they are to verify the customer's name, full address and phone number.
• they are to obtain the customer's email address if possible.
• their voice must show sincerity, interest and willingness.
• they must address the customer/caller by name at least twice in the course of the call and outside of the verification process.
• they must offer an appropriate and immediate apology and empathize with the customer.
• they must listen attentively and comprehend issues.
• they are not allowed to interrupt the customer.
• they must speak with a clarity of voice and their choice of words should be appropriate and devoid of slang or jargon.
• they must manage the dialogue and flow of the call.
• the csr must assume ownership of the situation without placing blame on any other part of, or individual within, the company.
• in their judgments and decisions, our stepford csr's must balance doing what is right for the customer and the company.
• they must effectively "root cause," and solve the customer's reason for calling.
• they must offer correct solutions and options.
• they must be thorough in eliminating callbacks.
• they must escalate calls appropriately.
• they must make commitments which adhere to company policy.
• the csr must be current on company initiatives and communications.
• the csr must exhibit good judgment in making any account adjustments.
• if a call is to be transferred, the csr must handle the process efficiently.
• the csr must "upsell." (this means highlighting some product or aspect of our service the customer may not otherwise be familiar with and attempting to sell it.)
• the csr must attempt to walk the customer through our automated attendant in order to increase the customer's familiarity and comfort level with the same.
• they must accurately input all data into our computer system.
• they must correctly handle multiple requests.
• they must leave a note on the account if they have escalated it in any way.
• they must disposition every call. (this is to say they must tag the account to identify the nature of the particular call.)
• they must navigate through the computer system proficiently.
• they must multi-task.
• they must end all aspects of their call in a timely fashion.
• they must summarize their resolution actions with their customer at the end of their call.
• they must leave the customer with a favorable impression.
• they must close the call correctly, which is to say they must ask if there is anything else the customer requires help with and thank the customer for calling.
  
  these csr's are graded on their performance monthly. eight recorded calls are listened to and scored based on the above criteria. a csr can score a zero, one or two, with two being the highest score and the one being weighted to 80% of a two.
  
  this reference tool is new and we have been haggling over it for the last couple of weeks.

the real question all of this begs is which design will benefit the company/organization more? the one where management tries to exert an incredible amount of control over each and every word that spills from the mouth of it's robotic csr's or one in which a csr is treated as a human being and allowed room to be the same? do you gain more by nurturing a mutual respect and benevolence in the csr or by laying down a strict law and telling them to abide by it?

i don't know the answer to this question. i would we treated everyone as an individual and nurtured a trust and respect in our employees. on some inner level, i believe this would bode well for business in so much as the csr would perform better out of a sense of loyalty and respect. at the same time, i admit i could be ridiculously wrong about that. it seems to me more and more, the people coming in the door to take this entry level position prefer to be treated in such a way as they are told what to do and browbeat int submission in the process. it seems to me they have been programmed to pay the closest attention to what they have been told to do and to spend as much time wriggling out of responsibilities as trying to satisfy them. they are all but programmed not to trust their employers who are viewed as "the man," as much as a police officer driving down the street.

isn't this the difference between capitalism and communism? doesn't the capitalist say: man is essentially a lazy creature and he will try to avoid work and he will look for handouts if he is not motivated by means of the old pitchfork in the ass, while the communist says: man is essentially a good creature and if promoted and treated positively with respect and goodwill, he will respond in kind and achieve the greatest of all possible results through brotherhood and working for the common good?

i guess i'm a communist and the majority of my peers and contemporaries are capitalists?

10 years

i can't go back in time. in order to document what happens in the office, in my office, i have to just start writing and telling you about everything that is happening as it happens. i suppose i can and will go back in alluding to and referencing events gone by but mostly, i mean to create a running narrative of day to day events in an office environment. however i will preface with the following brief background.

i have worked in this office for 10 years. i started at the bottom of the ladder and have risen to the humbling status of one who manages those at the bottom. (i am in lumborg's position though i would to tell the story from his perspective.)

my company supplies both a product and a service to consumers. in our industry, we are one of the largest companies doing business. . .

you're fired

people lost their jobs in my work place today. it made me feel bad, more mad than sad. as i reconstruct hearing the news and sensing the rage welling up within, i am forced to confront what makes me so angry about the scenario. i know both of the people fired-they are from the group i formerly managed. they both had poor attendance and this is why they were terminated. i can't say exactly how bad the attendance was, but i know it had improved recently and of course, they always called and had explanations for absences and tardies. these are 20-somethings. they both have not only a lot of drama in their lives, they have had serious medical issues, (which is what is especially shocking about my company firing them considering the risk.)

the two workers who were sent to the dole both did high quality work, (above average and probably around the 90 and 75 percentiles.) (this estimation is meant to include the drawback that is their attendance record.) a coworker made some remarks about this situation, basically suggesting everything was just considering the burden poor attendance represents to our business, and i think it is fair to say, this is how the majority views this situation. this sounds like common sense.

"i don't care how good they are, they do us no good if they're not here to assist our customers," i remember one of our former managers saying.

is that true though? i mean, sure, they help no one when they are helping no one. but our society seems to adore the punctual automaton while i would much prefer a living, thinking, breathing, corporeal human being in my employ. if it were my business, (and that is exactly how i view my work every day,) i would rather have a team of people who do quality work, think and make sound judgments readily but have some attendance issues, than a group of perfectly punctual asses who don't read books in their free time. (okay, okay, i exagerrate, but you must remember this all happened today and i'm still pissed. i don't really think all people who do not occasionally read books are idiots.) (mostly.) let me run an identical company with my kind of employees versus a company of perfect attendance employees and i believe i will bankrupt that other company. quality shows through to the customer.

attendance shows too, although if you have an environment with one hundred-plus people taking calls from customers, you likely have some wiggle room with which to plan for a certain amount of attendance deviation. in this way, the problem practically comes down to a tug of war of management styles. as the manager of an environment like i have described, you can ask those who schedule and manage service level to plan for more "shrinkage," as they call it, recognizing that when things are slow there is always plenty of work to do that is not answering phones, or you can have a strict attendance policy, constantly fire 20-somethings and pay the price of constantly training new reps to take the place of those who crossed the line and reap no benefits of continuity or higher morale.

this job of customer service representative is an entry level position. it pays better than entry level fast food but not as well as an entry level construction worker, (or, "yard dog.") in order to obtain this entry level position answering phones in the holy name of customer service, you must pass a test to prove you have some basic typing and computer skills as well as show some experience in similar areas. (the pay range to start is about $11 per hour or less and ranges up to the mid-to-high teens.)

if you want this job, you have to be willing to work as a temporary employee through an agency. this allows the corporation to "terminate your assignment," at will.

in our day and age, the staffing agency acts as a buffer between the employee and employer by allowing a person to work for a company without the company making a commensurate commitment to the employee. (this is to say, the employee has to get up and go to work every day and perform the assigned tasks but the company avoids the due process normally involved in the termination of employment as well as providing for unemployment insurance. . .) the staffing agency is, for all intents and purposes, a concoction of the corporation.

as osha and various government regulations required corporations to provide for injured employees and the like, these agencies came into prominence having different laws that govern their responsibilities to employees. i'm guessing now but it makes sense these laws expected the agencies to supply seasonal labor and such as opposed to how they are operating today. now, they are booming businesses in their own right as they require a minimal amount of manpower to run but have their hands in the pocket of virtually every employee they link to an employer. the relationship is great for the employer and the agency.

it is true that the agency also allows the employer to get a sense of the employee, to know what kind of work ethic they have or how quickly they learn and adapt. having worked these 10 years in a business environment, i understand why the employer would need that. the people i have worked with over the years, (the actual employees of the corporation,) have had a truly low level of accurate intuition or insight into the people they manage. i assume corporations learned long ago they could not trust their employees to be intuitive enough to hire the right people, people who could be trusted, people who would reciprocate what a company offered and could offer. yet another reason the corporation devised the staffing agency.

in addition to a willingness to work through a staffing agency, an entry level csr must agree to abide by the letter of the law as it relates to breaks and lunches, etc. whereas if a person worked at the jiffy lube changing oil on automobiles, there is a staff and a certain amount of glad-handing and grab-assing that goes on. in a call center environment a csr must be responsible to anywhere from 8-20 customers per hour and in about 5 minute bursts. think about that. every five minutes the csr is introduced, (or rather, introduced themself,) to a new customer who expects the csr to be an expert on the business and an official representative of the same. considering the pay, that is a lot of responsibility.

since the csr is the person a customer actually reaches if they have a need to contact the company, the csr is tasked with answering for the mistakes of virtually anyone in the organization. if the marketing department uses a predictive dialer to contact a customer to the customer's annoyance, the csr hears about it. if the person who delivers the product and service, errs, it is often the csr who hears about it. if the ceo makes a decision to aggressively push a product on the company's customers, the csr is expected to empathize with the customer's indignation, proclaim the company's best intentions, (meaning the csr must in part be adept at acting,) and soothe the customer in order to retain their business. (all for $11 an hour, or so.)

as if that weren't enough, csr's must learn complicated computer programs, retain a great deal of information about regional or product variations, and recite a measure of scripted sentiment. i knew when i was a csr i wanted out of that job. i chose to move up and i have been rewarded with a less stressful position and greater compensation.

maybe what it really comes down to is how severe are the attendance issues? well, we are talking about people who are probably late to work about 1.5 times per week by about 10-12 minutes each time. Additionally, they likely average about three days out ill every two months. That's substantial but in the grander scheme i described previously, (where it could easily be planned for,) is it so severe you fire valuable employees of five-plus years? the coworker i argued with could not imagine herself wrong about this issue. she feels it is righteous to expect people to come to work every day and on time. she was as indignant that i might think something other than that as i was that she could not get outside of that paradigm of acceptable employee behaviors to see another view. she cannot see that taking 75 customer service calls per day is stressful and worth a lot more money than those who do it get paid, (be they in india or indio.)

i read once that the average american worker works about 5.5 hours for every eight they get paid for. i can see that. i think about the various jobs i have had and i can see it being more or less. the csr's in my office work about seven hours per day. they get two 15-minute breaks and i imagine on average they screw around for another half hour. (they are allotted about 10 minutes of personal time meaning we expect them to work seven hours and 20 minutes.

having fired these two, (three now as i write a few days post facto,) i wonder about whom is failing the organization in quantifying the costs associated with training new reps to take the places of those who have been terminated. it makes me think all that rhetoric i read in business books about training your employees and the value of retaining them is not at all how those who make decisions think on the subject.

it bothers me more that a coworker could not even bring herself to see another side of this issue. her righteous sense about her own perspective offended me, (and i pride myself on being nearly unoffendable.)

the day after this conversation my boss arrived early in the morning and asked me to come to his office. he said he was in possession of an email from my coworker which suggested i was not on board with our attendance policy. i explained that i need my job. (of course i'm on board.)