Your Story...Is Irrelevant

Let me spell this out clearly, because a lot of people seem to be having trouble getting this idea in their head. We DO NOT want to hear why you can't pay your bill. Just tell us you can't pay right now and that you want to set up a payment arrangement.

Allow me to expand on this a bit. I've heard almost every possible (reasonable) excuse for not being able to pay the bill. I've also heard a few unreasonable excuses as well.

The following is a list of excuses heard regularly:

1.) I'm on disability
2.) I'm a single mom
3.) My wife left me and didn't pay the bills
4.) Times are hard
5.) I work in retail
6.) There's been a death in the family.
7.) I've been in the hospital

The following is a list of excuses that are pretty rare, but have been heard:

1.) My dog ate the check
2.) I only pay in cash
3.) Someone stole my identity

Now...the reason you can't pay your bill is irrelevant. We have the same set of guidelines regardless of scenario. So skip the bullshit and just ask for an extension. It's not that we don't care...it's just that we don't care.

A Garden Hose??

Thought this was pretty interesting:

A guy calls in today, wanting to know where we stand on getting his meter moved. Additionally, his gas is off and he wants to know what's going on. Looking at the service order history, we turned his gas off 3 weeks ago. The technician's comments: "Locked meter, read, meter piped with garden hose."

Interestingly enough, it was his contractor who thought running a garden hose from his meter to the house was a sound plan.

Things You May Not Know

Here are a few things you may not know about a call center:

1.) They're rarely located in the same state as where they service.
2.) They're subcontracted out to the companies that do service your local area.
3.) The companies that subcontract the call centers hold them to certain "Service Levels". Example: Every month, the call center is to answer at least 85% of the incoming calls within the first 30 seconds they come in. Calls that are holding for any longer than that negatively impact the service level. Should the SLA not be met, the call center is required to pay them, usually in excess of $10,000.00 for failure to meet contractual obligation.

Now, let's take a look at how this affects customers. At my particular call center, we have a customer base of 400,000. The total number of Customer Service Representatives (CSR's) is sitting at about 60. This leaves us a ratio of 6666.67 customers per representative. Not all CSR's are working every day, round the clock. So it'd be safe to say that around 45 representatives are manning the phones during the peak hours.

45 people to handle 400,000 customers that may call in. If a tiny fraction of our customers call in, we still may be overwhelmed, beyond the point of saving the SLA.

We smoke a lot of cigarettes.

Ground 0

This blog is, in essence, to keep me from filling my regular blog with angry posts about my work life and the absurdities of being in a call center. This post is merely a test post, but more will follow soon.