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This thread was going to be the usual stranger-than-fiction episode of the last few days of work. Alas, much has changed and so there is a different focus that needs to be addressed. So there will be no SC's in this thread, for my notes are at my desk of which I no longer have access to. But I am posting it here because this is where most of my dear friends and readers watch for me.
I am no longer Kara_CS. That is to say, Kara in Customer Service. Now I'm just plain ol' Kara. I was with my company for almost 4 years. It was the best job I ever had, and the best company I ever worked for. Hey, now that I don't work there anymore, I can let the cat out of the bag. For all those who wondered which wireless giant I was with, it was T-Mobile. But don't hate the company itself for what happened. It was simple office politics.
Yesterday, I got a message not to report for my regular shift, but to meet at 4 for a meeting with HR. I knew something was up. We got our asses kicked last year, losing our coveted J.D. Powers & Associates #1 in Wireless Customer Satisfaction to Verizon after 5 consecutive wins. After 14 months, there are only 5 million customers signed up with MyFaves. And HotSpot@Home, which spent 2 years in R&D plus market testing, is barely off the ground after 6 months. Both are awesome services, but our company's policy of centering their advertising on the customer and not the product leaves our customers confused about exactly what these services are. I had hours and hours of training on these services, my customers get a vague 30 second advertisement. FlexPay is going strong (1 million customers since it launched earlier this year), but it's a no-contract hybrid of prepaid and monthly service, so it's an unreliable service. Oh, and the iPhone is still destroying us. No one wants to hear about our phones, they want what the media tells them they want. And corporate still refuses to focus our advertising on the phones themselves, so when I tell a customer about the sheer awesomeness of the Wing or the Shadow, I could be offering them a banana for all they know.
Not that T-Mobile is doing poorly, it was just a rough year. So I immediately wondered if my job was in danger. I tried to imagine any and every other possibility for the cryptic message I got, but I knew the horrible truth. So I went in at 4 and a girl from HR was at the front desk. She tole me to have a seat in the lobby and the HR manager would be right with me as soon as he was finished with his current meeting. 20 minutes later, my Coach (SUP) walked by, smiling and saying it would just be a moment. A few minutes after that, she came out and told me to come on back.
Any hope I had vanished when I walked in his office and saw it was just him, my Coach, and my TM (Team Manager, which is my department manager). My Coach started by telling me that she had noticed while listening to my calls on Saturday that a call had dropped suddenly while I was with a customer. No big deal, this happens. But, they thought it was odd because when they checked the account, there were no memos from me, only a footprint (which is just an auto-memo from the system if a rep doesn't leave notes to show that X rep accessed the account at X date/time). So the wanted me to explain what happened.
I said I didn't know. I was so damn tired on Saturday from working both jobs that I don't recall any calls dropping. But, because of working 2 jobs, I'm often so exhausted by evening that hours go by without my notice, that I can be talking to one customer, and the next thing I know, it's an hour later and I'm in the middle of speaking to another one. I let them know that I was fully aware of the importance of this as my primary job, and that I was already in the process of cutting back at my night job so that I would be more alert for our customers here.
The my TM added her thoughts. She said that it's all well and good for me to say this, but it was really funny that since my Coach was at lunch at the time the call dropped. I told her I would never intentionally release a call, there would be no reason to. And, after being here for almost 4 years, I wasn't going to do anything to jeopardize my job. I was happy with the company, I love my job, and I wasn't going to do something stupid and screw that up.
My Coach had her turn again, and said that when she was there Saturday that she hadn't noticed any problems with my calls, and I was doing fine. So then she goes to lunch and this call mysteriously is lost and I didn't leave any notes. I always try to note "Call Dropped," but if we're being slammed with calls and I barely got the customer's name, it's easy to just close the account and move on. They gave me the "benefit of a doubt" and had IT check my systems, but there were no issues they found that could result in the call being dropped.
I told them I couldn't say what happened. I didn't remember it occurring. Calls drop, it happens. I can't recall every single one of them, especially if it was within the first minute or so of the call.
My TM then said that they determined it wasn't caused on our end by a system glitch, and there was no proof that I didn't release the call (it was not lost on me that they didn't mention there was no proof I did, either). She said the company paid me to take the call, then it ended. The customer called right back and they had to pay another rep to take the call, then another to take the transfer. And that was a poor customer service experience for our customer, which is unacceptable.
At this point, my Coach said they had decided to terminate my employment. I fought back the urge to scream, I fought back the tears. I knew they had already determined my fate long before I set foot in there, and I wasn't about to let them see me cry. I turned in my badge,the HR guy gave me an "Exit Pack," just a few sheets explaining when my benefits and phone service end, and the TM told me that I need to make better decisions about how I divide my time. They're going to box up the contents of my desk and I'll pick them up when I come in for my final paycheck.
And that's it. The end. Not with a bang, but a whimper. Not once had I ever fallen out of good standing with the company, not once had I ever had even a verbal warning, but none of that mattered. No second chances, just "See ya." Even though I pretty much knew it was coming, it still hurt me deeply. My SO drove me in, just in case. I'm glad she did, I was too devastated to drive. And having smiling children telling me how much they loved their Mama Kara helped a lot.
It really sucks how vague the whole thing was. "Gee, it's funny this call dropped while I was on lunch and there was no Memo. Forget that it happens to everyone, but we're singling you out. We know you'd never, ever do that. We can't prove you did it, but you can't prove you didn't, and since we're in charge your ass is gone." I suspect I'm not the first, nor will I be the last. The HR guy was already in a meeting when I got there, and my TM had already been there, and stayed there when I left (after I sucked it up and told her that it had been a pleasure and an honor to be a part of the company and I was sorry it came to this). The company is probably just doing what companies do when they've suffered a blow: Recover costs and losses by picking off the frontline employees. It's the way business has always worked, how it will always work.
It just sucks it happened to me.
I won't be defeated by this. Now I can get another job here in town and save a crapload of gas money by not having a 30 minute drive to work. I still have 2 paychecks coming from T-Mobile, plus a bonus from December since I worked the whole month. So here in a little bit, I'll be out pimping myself to every business I can find and filling out applications. I'd like a change of pace. There's a state prison here and they're hiring. I can't imagine that rapists and murderers are much worse than customers, maybe I'll try that out. Plus, that would make me a state employee, and the benefits would be out of this world. Other than that, I dunno. I could work at a bank, that probably isn't too awful. There are 50 million Payday loan places around here, that's probably easy as hell (but likely doesn't pay much). I'll let you guys know when I get something. Plus, I still have my night job.
There will be one final T-Mobile horror story. It will be painful, but it will be witty and dripping with sarcasm. I just have to wait a couple of weeks until I can get my notes from my desk. I am completely crushed right now. I have never even been in trouble or in danger of being fired at a job before, let alone terminated. You always here about friends and coworkers getting arbitrarily fired for this or that absurd reason. In a job like this, it happens all the time. The best you can do is enjoy the time you have until it happens to you.
-Kara, former CSR
I am no longer Kara_CS. That is to say, Kara in Customer Service. Now I'm just plain ol' Kara. I was with my company for almost 4 years. It was the best job I ever had, and the best company I ever worked for. Hey, now that I don't work there anymore, I can let the cat out of the bag. For all those who wondered which wireless giant I was with, it was T-Mobile. But don't hate the company itself for what happened. It was simple office politics.
Yesterday, I got a message not to report for my regular shift, but to meet at 4 for a meeting with HR. I knew something was up. We got our asses kicked last year, losing our coveted J.D. Powers & Associates #1 in Wireless Customer Satisfaction to Verizon after 5 consecutive wins. After 14 months, there are only 5 million customers signed up with MyFaves. And HotSpot@Home, which spent 2 years in R&D plus market testing, is barely off the ground after 6 months. Both are awesome services, but our company's policy of centering their advertising on the customer and not the product leaves our customers confused about exactly what these services are. I had hours and hours of training on these services, my customers get a vague 30 second advertisement. FlexPay is going strong (1 million customers since it launched earlier this year), but it's a no-contract hybrid of prepaid and monthly service, so it's an unreliable service. Oh, and the iPhone is still destroying us. No one wants to hear about our phones, they want what the media tells them they want. And corporate still refuses to focus our advertising on the phones themselves, so when I tell a customer about the sheer awesomeness of the Wing or the Shadow, I could be offering them a banana for all they know.
Not that T-Mobile is doing poorly, it was just a rough year. So I immediately wondered if my job was in danger. I tried to imagine any and every other possibility for the cryptic message I got, but I knew the horrible truth. So I went in at 4 and a girl from HR was at the front desk. She tole me to have a seat in the lobby and the HR manager would be right with me as soon as he was finished with his current meeting. 20 minutes later, my Coach (SUP) walked by, smiling and saying it would just be a moment. A few minutes after that, she came out and told me to come on back.
Any hope I had vanished when I walked in his office and saw it was just him, my Coach, and my TM (Team Manager, which is my department manager). My Coach started by telling me that she had noticed while listening to my calls on Saturday that a call had dropped suddenly while I was with a customer. No big deal, this happens. But, they thought it was odd because when they checked the account, there were no memos from me, only a footprint (which is just an auto-memo from the system if a rep doesn't leave notes to show that X rep accessed the account at X date/time). So the wanted me to explain what happened.
I said I didn't know. I was so damn tired on Saturday from working both jobs that I don't recall any calls dropping. But, because of working 2 jobs, I'm often so exhausted by evening that hours go by without my notice, that I can be talking to one customer, and the next thing I know, it's an hour later and I'm in the middle of speaking to another one. I let them know that I was fully aware of the importance of this as my primary job, and that I was already in the process of cutting back at my night job so that I would be more alert for our customers here.
The my TM added her thoughts. She said that it's all well and good for me to say this, but it was really funny that since my Coach was at lunch at the time the call dropped. I told her I would never intentionally release a call, there would be no reason to. And, after being here for almost 4 years, I wasn't going to do anything to jeopardize my job. I was happy with the company, I love my job, and I wasn't going to do something stupid and screw that up.
My Coach had her turn again, and said that when she was there Saturday that she hadn't noticed any problems with my calls, and I was doing fine. So then she goes to lunch and this call mysteriously is lost and I didn't leave any notes. I always try to note "Call Dropped," but if we're being slammed with calls and I barely got the customer's name, it's easy to just close the account and move on. They gave me the "benefit of a doubt" and had IT check my systems, but there were no issues they found that could result in the call being dropped.
I told them I couldn't say what happened. I didn't remember it occurring. Calls drop, it happens. I can't recall every single one of them, especially if it was within the first minute or so of the call.
My TM then said that they determined it wasn't caused on our end by a system glitch, and there was no proof that I didn't release the call (it was not lost on me that they didn't mention there was no proof I did, either). She said the company paid me to take the call, then it ended. The customer called right back and they had to pay another rep to take the call, then another to take the transfer. And that was a poor customer service experience for our customer, which is unacceptable.
At this point, my Coach said they had decided to terminate my employment. I fought back the urge to scream, I fought back the tears. I knew they had already determined my fate long before I set foot in there, and I wasn't about to let them see me cry. I turned in my badge,the HR guy gave me an "Exit Pack," just a few sheets explaining when my benefits and phone service end, and the TM told me that I need to make better decisions about how I divide my time. They're going to box up the contents of my desk and I'll pick them up when I come in for my final paycheck.
And that's it. The end. Not with a bang, but a whimper. Not once had I ever fallen out of good standing with the company, not once had I ever had even a verbal warning, but none of that mattered. No second chances, just "See ya." Even though I pretty much knew it was coming, it still hurt me deeply. My SO drove me in, just in case. I'm glad she did, I was too devastated to drive. And having smiling children telling me how much they loved their Mama Kara helped a lot.
It really sucks how vague the whole thing was. "Gee, it's funny this call dropped while I was on lunch and there was no Memo. Forget that it happens to everyone, but we're singling you out. We know you'd never, ever do that. We can't prove you did it, but you can't prove you didn't, and since we're in charge your ass is gone." I suspect I'm not the first, nor will I be the last. The HR guy was already in a meeting when I got there, and my TM had already been there, and stayed there when I left (after I sucked it up and told her that it had been a pleasure and an honor to be a part of the company and I was sorry it came to this). The company is probably just doing what companies do when they've suffered a blow: Recover costs and losses by picking off the frontline employees. It's the way business has always worked, how it will always work.
It just sucks it happened to me.
I won't be defeated by this. Now I can get another job here in town and save a crapload of gas money by not having a 30 minute drive to work. I still have 2 paychecks coming from T-Mobile, plus a bonus from December since I worked the whole month. So here in a little bit, I'll be out pimping myself to every business I can find and filling out applications. I'd like a change of pace. There's a state prison here and they're hiring. I can't imagine that rapists and murderers are much worse than customers, maybe I'll try that out. Plus, that would make me a state employee, and the benefits would be out of this world. Other than that, I dunno. I could work at a bank, that probably isn't too awful. There are 50 million Payday loan places around here, that's probably easy as hell (but likely doesn't pay much). I'll let you guys know when I get something. Plus, I still have my night job.
There will be one final T-Mobile horror story. It will be painful, but it will be witty and dripping with sarcasm. I just have to wait a couple of weeks until I can get my notes from my desk. I am completely crushed right now. I have never even been in trouble or in danger of being fired at a job before, let alone terminated. You always here about friends and coworkers getting arbitrarily fired for this or that absurd reason. In a job like this, it happens all the time. The best you can do is enjoy the time you have until it happens to you.
-Kara, former CSR
Would be awesome if you could get a job that's closer to home - more time with the SO and kidlings!
You'll find something soon.
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