Reporting from the front lines of Boni Europe's Customer Service

Now that I've been at Boni for almost four months and have been taking calls since December 1st, I thought it was due time that I give a follow-up report on how things are going.

It will never be easy. Though, I've gotten past my initial terror of taking calls to the point that now it is more of a simple nuisance when the phone rings, it is not a rewarding job. Despite brushing up on my Swedish and Danish, there's not a whole lot of actual "customer service" going on. The calls can be more an exercise in procedures and policy. More designed to push the customer away than actually helping them.

I had a realization about the job this week. I'd say pretty much every CSA (Customer Support Analyst) in the call-center started out trying to do a really good job. Trying to really help the customer with the problem. Then, little by little, that was beaten out of them. The way the "procedures" are set up, it makes it almost impossible to concentrate on quality. There are quotas and performance standards set in place that are incidiously self-policing. They expect every analyst to take at least 32 calls per day (with a ratio of about 25-28 incoming and 4-7 outgoing). The maximum average call duration is supposed to be 8 minutes followed by 3 minutes to "wrap up" after the call. If you take less than 32 calls or your average call duration is over 8 minutes, your "performance" score (a percentage) is penalized. Each analyst is supposed to be at a minimum of 80%. There are four "teams" in the call-center, each with one Senior CSA and one Team Leader. The Team Leader is the head whip-cracker and the Senior CSA is his lieutenant. The four Team Leaders get whipped by the call-center manager which leads them to whip the CSAs. Whenever the wallboards start beeping and flashing red, the Team Leaders get up and start pacing around to see if there is anyone who could be taking a call but currently isn't. Frequently, they will walk around calling out things like, "Four French waiting!" or "12 minutes!" See, they don't want ANYONE to have to wait on hold when they call in. If there are long wait times or high abandon rates (people getting tired of waiting and then hanging up) then the manager catches hell from his superiors which, of course, is why he then rips into the Team Leaders so that they will keep on us. The wallboards start beeping when a call has been waiting for more than 3 minutes. And it will keep beeping until the calls are taken or dropped. So, the pressure that we all get from our side of the phone is much more stressing than what we get from the customer's side.

Anyway, the scoring system that is implimented makes the Team Leaders very competitive with each other. If the team does well, he gets a pat on the back and brownie pointes (or progress towards a raise?). I was "fortunate" enough to be assigned to the most competitive Team Leader. A German taskmaster. He rides his CSAs pretty hard and, consequently, they have the highest percentage scores in the whole call-center. They more than make up for my lagging score. I've been struggling to maintain and/or pass the 80% mark, but I'm still quite a ways off. I had a bad week two weeks ago where my score ended up being 67%. I'm not sure why it was that low. I think I had a few too many long calls which dropped my productivity quite a bit. I've been taking an average of 20-25 calls per day (including outbound calls) which is pretty low by their standards. However, this is not necessarily because I'm slow, it has to do with the market. I take English calls from England, Greece, Portugal, Norway, Finland and Denmark; and Swedish calls from Sweden. The bulk of the calls are from England (a nation which seems to be abundantly well trained to complain) and I get maybe two to three calls from Sweden. People who take French or Dutch calls pretty much never have a break from calls coming in. However, the countries I deal with don't have as high volumes of calls. So there can be a lot of time where I'm not on the phone. During this time, I am doing e-Support cases (tech support submitted on our website) which of course also counts towards our performance score. I think it is something like 3-4 e-Support cases equates to one call. In the beginning, when I was only taking Swedish calls, I had great productivity in e-Support. However, now that I am taking calls from these other countries, my e-Support has really suffered. The frustrating thing is that I am ALWAYS working. I pretty much never take a break. Even so, I have plateaued at my average to below average score. This, of course, frustrates my Team Leader who is trying to find out how he can increase my output. I know how to do that... dramatically decrease the quality (i.e.- only focus on keeping the calls ridiculously short and taking as many as possible). Being a person who takes pride in my work, that's a bit hard for me to do. Hence, the analogy to being "broken" and turned into an automaton.

My Team Leader puts together a slide-show for every week which charts each of his CSAs activity. If you really want to be confused, you should see the progress report from my "bad week". You can clearly see that I need to increase my productivity so I'm more in line with the rest of the team. However, it's easier said than done. We are also evaluated for our quality. This is done by two guys who listen in to our calls randomly and then score it according to some set of rules. They then send these scoresheets to the team leaders. I tend to do pretty well on these, except for certain instances when I make some tiny slip-up on "procedure". All of the CSAs hate these forms and the scoring system involved. For example, you get severely penalized if you don't mention the web-site name at the end of a call. Depending on the situation, you can sound like a real idiot by asking the customer to have a look at our web-site (for example, if their computer is currently on the fritz). Anyway, it seems like you are damned if you do, damned if you don't. To keep your quality score high, you have to focus on quality. To keep your productivity score high, you have to focus on quantity. One is at the expense of the other!

Two weeks ago, I asked for a raise. I had a meeting with the head of Human Resources. I told her I didn't feel like my effort was being fairly rewarded. Since there are only two people left taking Swedish calls (two out of the four have already quit), she was not very happy to hear this. Especially since there is nothing she can do about it. The pay structure is very strict and based on evaluations. She explained why she couldn't give me a raise and what I would have to do to even be considered for it. In March I can ask for an "assessment" where they will rate several different elements of my work there. If they are all over 80%, then I MIGHT be able to get a raise to the next pay level which equates to maybe 100 euros more per month. Needless to say, I'm working my ass off to try to be ready for next month....

and more than ready to start on my Masters!

-RP-