Friday, December 18, 2020

Call Center Won't Give Employee Raise, Malicious Compliance Ensues


Call centers sound like they can be quite the soul sucking kind of establishment to work at. You regularly deal with irrational and unwarrantedly enraged customers that just refuse to recognize that there is in fact a human being on the other end of the call. And then you throw into the mix a company like the one we have in this story of malicious compliance...yikes, indeed. We're just grateful that this particular story has a happy ending for the poor employee that had to deal with a company trying to screw them over. 

1.

Text - r/MaliciousCompliance + Join u/ikarosswings0 • 1d Give me a raise or replace me. XL Almost a decade ago i worked in a call center doing over the phone tech support. I worked there for almost 7 years until i was fired because the desk phone they issues me malfunctioned for 6 weeks straight (despite my continued twice a week complaints). They didn't even try to appeal my unemployment either...

2.

Text - Anyway, i started there in 2008 and by 2010i had switched from a customer servixe roll to a tech support roll and then moved into a more senior tech support roll (which did not come with extra pay). My job consisted primarily of calling customers back who had an issue that normal tech support was unable to resolve. If i had time, i was expected to help call back customers who left dissatisfied surveys as well. I was also given certain blocks of time during the week to monitor the interdep

3.

Text - I take pride in my work. Once i learned the ins and outs of the system, i became rather competitive. Each survey or escalation had an associated ticket. We were expected to close 60 tickets per month per person. This equated to just under 3 per day. In order to close a ticket, we either had to resolve their issue (or at least note their additional survery feedback), escalate their issue to the corporate office (to die. More on that later), or leave 3 voice mails over 3 days and send them

4.

Text - monitored the chatroom, often more often than required, wrote articles for our internal database, helped our slowest members with paperwork, answered incoming front line emails if they were behind, and had low level agents directly transfer live customers to me rather than escalating them if i knew i could resolve their issue right away. Towards the end of that 3 years i also began helping out another department that dealt with customers who mailed their device in for repair. It wasn't th

5.

Text - The company i worked for (the one who signed my paychecks) was a contract company owned by a big multinational out of canada. They took contracts from companies like DirecTV, comcast, and usaa. I found out that the company i was doing contracted work for paid my company $35/hour for my time, but i only saw $10.50 of that. T also was almost never allowed over time, maybe 1-2 weeks a year for the entire 7 years. First level leaders were salaried and, if they didnt work any overtime, made ab

6.

Text - The company that msde the product i was troubleshooting was like a dumpster fire. They sold a product that developed a hardware issue, which they knew was a hardware issue, but they forbid us from telli a customer that and instead told them that we were working on a software update. Despite being primarily in the USA, our website only offered user manuals in spanish and the website developer claimed that it was "impossible" to add a new tab for user manuals to the website. A co worker re-

7.

Text - ship out a replacement device and would not provide any sort of loaner device. Minimum repair time was 3 weeks and the customer was responsible for shipping the device in, including paying for shipping and a box. If it got lost on the way, it wasn't our problem. Apparently our repair center decided that first in, first out wasnt a convenient system for processing the repairs, so they just pulled however they felt like it. I had the pleasure of calling customers who had mailed their device

8.

Text - Now comes the malicious compliance. The first came in when the company trier to launch an in house made data backup service. It was extremely poorly developed and failed miserably. Much better and free systems existed and even if the company's system had worked flawlessly, it had no benefits that i could see. When we started receiving complaints that it was not working, our corporate office told us to just immediately escalate to them, don't even troubleshoot. I knew nothing was ever goin

9.

Text - could change the responsible person on the ticket fron myself to the person at corporate in charge of this issue st the beginning instead of assigning it to them at the end. I entered 128 tickets for that issue alone that night (i was working second shift at the time). It only took me a few hours. T had plenty of time to do real work after that. That means the person at corporate who was supposed to handle these cases came in to work the next day with over 350 new emails in their inbox. W

10.

Text - My last malicious compliance came when they started letting people work from home. They did this to save on operating costs as they expanded the work force. By moving associates to work from home (this was 2012), they didnt have to pay for electricity or as much bandwith, etc. If you worked from home, you were issues a terminal and keyboard/mouse and a phone. You had to supply a monitor and the system was a virtual machine. When an opportunity came up to switch to work from home, i put in

11.

Text - was actually money. I didnt get a pay cut and i was spending a lot of money on on gas because i lived 25 miles from work and gas was over $4 a gallon a the time. Working from home was like a $0.50/hour raise because i was spending $20 a week on gas. Working from home was also great for me because i could work incmy pajamas, and didnt waste over an hour driving to and from work. I never understood why they wouldnt let me do what i had been doing before from home, i had all the same tools a

12.

Text - I stayed with the company for 3 years after that, mostly because the work was easy and i wasn't particularly motivated to find something better. I ended up getting fired in the end. Like i said, they issued me a desk phone. It was like a landlime phone, but had an LCD screen with some configurable options on it, and you could plug in a headset, and it worked over the internet. About 6 weeks before i got fired, my phone started having an issue where it would drop calls. Normally, it would

13.

Text - unavailable state, and despite me telling him that it was my desk phone and that it had been happening for weeks, insisted on giving me a formal verbal warning. When my supervisor came in the next day, she immediately called me and told me she was upgrading my verbal warning to a final written warning. The company, like many, had a 4 step system of of verbal, written, final written warning, and then terminated. She gave no reason for why she was upgrading it to a final written. A few days

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Text - a Friday night and they said that normal help desk personel wouldnt be available until monday morning. I hung up and called my boss instead. It went to voicemail. I continued to try to reach out to my boss Saturday, sunday, and monday via text, phone, and email. I had been scheduled to work all weekend (i normally had days off in the middle of the week) but couldn't do so as i was unable to log in to my terminal or phone. Monday morning i called the help desk again and was told that i "wa

15.

Text - I was on unemployment for 6 weeks before starting at my curent job. Since then i have gotten 2 promotions and am currently making more than double what i made at my old job. To top it all off, last year the company lost a class action lawsuit for making people sign into their terminals and open software before clocking in. They didn't want to pay peoppe for those 5 or so minutes a day, and they lost millions of dollars. I got a check for a few hundred bucks out of it which was a nice touc

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