Boss gets dragged online for reprimanding call center employee's plot to avoid taking calls: 'I can detect all the schemes'

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  • A call center manager looks frustrated at his desk.
  • I discovered a remote employee of mine has been running a major scheme for months

    A few weeks ago, I took over a new team of experienced, remote customer service employees.
  • In the morning, while doing a routine review of calls, I noticed something strange. One of my employees called our IT helpdesk. right as his shift started, even before they were open.
  • I listened to the call and found he stayed on the line listening to their hold music for a full 25 minutes.
  • Afterwards, he hung up normally and started taking his first real work call of the day as if nothing had happened.
  • So, of course, I had to look into this. I discovered that he has been doing this exact same thing every day for at least the last 6 months.
  • Our software would register his line as 'busy' on the basis that he was on a call, so he never appeared as idle or unavailable.
  • No one had noticed this at all until now. To be sure, I monitored his status live ultimately.
  • The call center manager looks suspicious as he monitors his employee's activity.
  • And indeed, with ten minutes left in his shift, I saw him call one of the company's old, forgotten conference call numbers and just stayed on the line by himself until his shift ended.
  • The amount of audacity is honestly shocking. "Call avoidance" has occurred since the dawn of time and has nothing to do with WFH.
  • Develop a short call report for quick outbound that will reset their idle time and put them last to take a call.
  • I used to call it "slacker report," but changed it to short call report to be more PC.
  • The tricks that employees use to escape from work are many and are truly clever, requiring great focus and constant monitoring.
  • I worked for a while in hiring employees and I can detect all the schemes, which has helped me.
  • If you're in the call centre industry, you'll know the tricks reps use.
  • Chemical-Hornet-3695 PROMOTE HIM TO PRESIDENT
  • MarleysGhost2024 I knew a guy that worked for Sun Oil Company. They transferred him to a little town in New Mexico, and then forgot about him. He called the main office every day for a couple of months, and they kept telling him they'd get back to him. But they didn't. He finally quit calling. They only woke up when, after 4 years, he put in for a new company truck. He's one of my personal heroes.
  • Sensitive-Swim-3679 Clearly he has been around a long enough to know the right numbers to play his game. Give an update when you blow him up.
  • Working_Priority_945 Once I needed to resolve something with a broker my past employer used for equity awards. I tried to call them for few days and waiting time was longer than I could wait. When I finally got a response, I found why. After they were done with my business in ~20 minutes, I was expecting to stay on the line to see if there would be any feedback poll. But the representative actually never dropped the call. I was able to listen their conversation with some friend for about an hour
  • P4yTheTrollToll As an ex telecom engineer who ran contact centers, this is nothing unusual. It used to be a game, agents find a way to manipulate the system and we'd find out, then put a stop to it. Calling the help desk is a well known ploy, we used to pay people when they had IT problems for up to 4 hours. People would call the help desk, sit in queue, wait 20 minutes, hang up and call back. I've even caught people putting forwards on their line to route calls back into the IVR, or send it to
  • Apart_Wrangler_3415 Welcome to having a team who use phones.
  • Mission-Library-7499 And this is why we can't have nice things.
  • randomid12345 Unless it was explicitly stated that this is not something to do, the employee did nothing wrong.
  • sowokeicantsee The worst employees build the best policies and procedures. Thank him for his duty of business improvement

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