Head honchos: making it tough to get your bonus.

[sld72382]

As I told you guys a while ago, my call center has a bonus program that adds $2 per hour to your check as long as you make your audits and make your hours.

For your audits, it used to be 90% for the corporate audit (where the retail store honchos listen in) and 85% the in-house audit (which was done by just the call center). For the hours, it used to be 36 actual hours after lunches and "aux" time (for those that don't work in call centers, "aux" is a term used when you set your phone to not take calls, ie like when you're going to the bathroom).

Well it seems like too many people were getting their bonuses as they raised the requirements to a 100% pass-or-fail for the corporate audit, 90% for the in-house audit and 37 actual hour afters lunches and aux. While one extra hour may not seem like much, that means if you have a crappy aux day you may miss your bonus. As for the audit, if a retail store honcho lowers your score a point or two (usually over something stupid), there goes your bonus too.

It's already taken it's toll on a couple of people in my row. One had an issue with his databases crashing so he had to spend time on aux documenting his calls, he had 3 other days where his aux was great (read: really low) and because of one crappy day he missed the actual hours by .07% (and the supervisors refused to put in a "time-lost" request). Another co-worker has missed her bonus since the new requirements because the retail store honchos think her empathy statements don't sound sincere, even though she passes the empathy requirements on the in-house audit.

For me, it's led my co-workers to call me "policy boy" because I am so afraid of failing an audit so I act pretty much like a kiss-ass to the auditors (say things to the client and put things in the case notes purely to look good to them) and limit my aux to a crazy minimum.

[BlaqueKatt]

due to aux abuse at my center-we no longer have aux time unless you are on a scheduled break, if you have to leave your desk for any reason not work related-you have to have your schedule adjusted so you use your break time(we're allowed 30 minutes-usually as either 2 15 minute breaks or 3 10 minute breaks)-they also took away "after call" due to abuse. <sigh> and then the ones that abused it complain.

[Reyneth]

Bah. After call aux work is one of the banes of my existence at work. They are currently entertaining the possibility of raising the % of time we are able to be unavailable and still pass - partially due to a new phone system that seems to be much harsher (and more inaccurate!) than the previous one. There are a lot of new people in my group (me being a relatively new one) but even the veterans that would meet or exceed before aren't making it.

Of course, I'm helping the campaign to change the %. Like calculating that we have something like 6.5 minutes per hour to not be available excluding breaks. One trip to the printer to get an estimate you need to mail out takes up most of your time for that hour (since the rule is if you're getting your stuff from the printer tray, you need to sort the other docs into slots by employee)! Or one request to a supervisor to run a phone number (to find the claim).

It's just not possible. Granted, I'll 'sacrifice' my time to do a data search if it could be useful (ie, a state where we can suspend the driver's license, it fits the criteria for that state at a quick glance and we're just missing a piece of info or two to do so). Why? Because that's our main tool to recovering money! We are fully staffed, have a tiny drop rate but yet it doesn't matter that I'm helping maximize the money we can collect in the future because 1)my ACW % is high and 2)I rarely see that money in my rep code directly anyway. I should just be a slacker like my coworkers or something. ****

So whenever I see an opportunity to point out to my Sup that the ACW% that they want us to do is danged near impossible except on that rare perfect day, I do it. Like the outbound dialers when the other party IMMEDIATELY hangs up. You don't even have a chance to get into the claim let alone put in your quick note about it. And when they have that dialer cranked up, you need 30 sec unavailable time to do that note or you have the next call right there and - guess what, you don't have their info because you didn't have time to close the first one out! Seriously, there are times they have that dialer cranked so fast that you have NO time to even hit the speed-dial we have in our programs to a Sup to plead to slow it down so we can breathe. That thing has such a small % of return, too - it's not worth it!

And fast outbound dialer means we can be hitting about 20-40/hr (I've seen it) plus a few inbounds if you get all voicemails, "wrong #s," leaving a message to call back with another person and hangups. 30 obcs, 8 immediate hangups means 4 of your 6.5 minutes for that hour are now gone to put in the note that the other party didn't even give you a chance to say "hello." (Not that I blame them, the dialer will call and call and drop calls if it thinks it hasn't made a successful connection to vm or person - so a person can get 2-4 dropped calls where there's not an agent on the other end before they finally get connected and won't have any more calls for that day.)


Can you tell what the other bane of my existence besides the ACW% is?


*** I've started keeping track of claims that I have done that sort of thing - found the info to help the company eventually get the money so when I'm in for an interview and they want examples of going above and beyond, I've got a whole list of them rather than just vague stories.

[Gurndigarn]

Sometimes I think— no, forget the "sometimes"— that corporate bozos never paid attention to how people really act.

Corporate mentality: Everyone else offers a bonus program to give their workers to excell, so we should, too.
Employee mentality: cool.

Later corporate mentality: We're giving away a lot of money. We should tighten the requirements on the bonus so that our employees work harder.
Employee mentality: #%$&! It's not like it wasn't hard enough before. It's not like the bonus is big enough to make any difference in the end. I'm not even going to try.