“Rubin, you got back a review,” my manager says, walking past my desk, dropping the paper in front of me.
“Goody,” I say, with faux enthusiasm, picking it up. “My favorite time of the week.”
“You may not want to look at this one; it’s not that spectacular,” she continues, dropping one on the desk in front of Kurt, who is nearly passed out, having spoken with the same rambler for almost an hour.
I flip the paper over and my eyes widen at my score. “Fifty percent?! What the hell?” I let it fall to my desk without looking at the reason. I swivel the chair to face her as she pauses in her majestic stride. “What did I do?”
She stops short and twists her body one joint at a time down to her hip to glare down on me with a cold and predatory face. “You opened the account in the wrong system,” she hisses. “They are taking off 50 points now if you do that.”
Before I can be indignant, I need to explain the situation. It gets a little technical, and I suppose I should have gotten into this earlier, but I didn’t want to bore anyone with shop talk, but seeing as this is now important, allow me to bore.
We work with two operating systems. The first is a dinosaur of a system that contains every account we have the ability to access. This includes accounts that have long been sent to collection agencies and have been purged from all other records, accounts that have just been set up and have no financial information, regular accounts that we can take payments on, everything. This system is somewhat tricky to work with, but once mastered, is the most complete source of information we have in our hands. In less than five seconds, you can see who the person is, whom they’ve talked to in any other department, and how much they owe, if anything.
For the last month or so, they have been encouraging us to use this system only if necessary, in favor of the newer system, which was installed about a month before I was hired. The new system is brighter, modern looking, sleek, and streamlined. Half the time, it’s faster than the old system. Everything is available at the touch of a button, not some bizarre abbreviated command. Two major problems: 1) The newer system crashes at least once a week, most frequently on Sunday, when nearly every rep on the floor is using System 2 for outgoing calls. 2) The system carries only accounts that we can take a payment on. If we bring up an account that does not have any billing information, this system says that the account doesn’t exist. This leaves customers furious when they call in about an account they just set up, and some green rep is saying they’re not a customer.
True, we are the financial services department, and our job is to collect money, so we don’t need to know other things about the account, but it helps. That way, even if you can’t help a customer, you can give them advice on how to proceed and make sure they get to the right people. For a beleaguered customer that has been mis-transferred twice to Financial Services for a fraud issue, this basic knowledge is an immeasurable help. I’ve saved numerous customers just because I had slightly more knowledge on what needed to be done, even if I couldn’t do it myself.
SpectraCom, in all it’s infinite wisdom, has decided that the two to five seconds it takes me to acquire this extra helpful knowledge is far too long. I may save the customer more than a 100 times that in the long run, but as far as the company is concerned, I’m wasting time. Up until today, the company was just suggesting that we didn’t use it. There had been no prior warning that they were going to start docking points off reviews.
“Were they going to tell us about this, or just mark us off?”
“There is a retraining meeting today for that and a few other things.”
“A training meeting... after they start marking people off?”
“Yeah, makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it?” She grins wickedly and is almost unable to contain a delightful little cackle. “Don’t you love how this place works?”
“Well, the only way to keep me from using it is to take it away, so I’m never going to have a score above 50 percent again.”
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