7 Rants »

7 Rants this month

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1. no one besides sprint reps know what we realy go through…we have customers calling in call after call after call for 8-10 hrs a day…yelling and complainding and some attack personaly to the rep they are speaking to….do people not realize that we are human….i mean seriously…we understand that you are calling in about a problem and that you dont understand your bill…we do…because we look at bills just like yours daily….sprint service is good…but its the problem with the people who work for sprint….and why is it..beacuse of the customers…you deal with a bad customer….its human to get mad back…if we talk back to you, we get fired…we have so much frustration built up inside that we will make errors…not purposly but it will happen…everyone who is under alot of stress will make mistkaes…some reps have the ability to keep there cool…like me..some calls in and is yelling and cussing…i kinda laugh to my self because i knows there problem can be fixed…and i fix it..and your still mad…and i laugh to my self again….the cust is mad because they didnt hear or get what they wanted….thats it….it you cannot afford a phone…turn it off..and for people who cant affor d to pay a bill but can afford to go over there bills all the damn time…shut the hell up on the phone and use it for something then talking about a baby mama drama…people need to get lives…

   Comment by Anonymous — April 3, 2008 @ 6:20 am

2. to the sprint rep who does/does not feel like helping ‘nonpaying’, ‘whining’ customers. Sprint Stock: as of 04/2005- $22.26, as of 04/2008- $6.50. You guys have managed to drop the value of sprint stock by over 71% in just three years!! Don’t think it’s your fault? I would also refer you to the msn money/zogby poll which rated sprint as #1…….. for the customer service ‘Hall of Shame’. With 40% of their customers rating them as ‘poor’. I guess those are the cutomers you’re referring to. Anyway, with the kind of numbers I have outlined here, I wouldn’t worry about how much longer you’ll have to deal with those troublesome customers. soon you won’t have any (or a job). Disagree? What happened to Sprint local phone service? Oh that’s right, they had to sell the company to Embarq….good luck Sprint hero!!

   Comment by another time wasting customer — April 11, 2008 @ 7:38 am

3. SPRINT IS THE WORST CELL PHONE COMAPNY OUT THERE. I BELIEVE, WHEN THE FRAUD INVESTIGATION IS DONE THEY WILL FIND OUT THAT THE ONLY PEOPLE GUILTY OF FRAUD IS SPRINT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! MAYBE WE SHOULD ALL GET IN ON THE CLASS ACTION LAWSUIT.

   Comment by Anonymous — April 13, 2008 @ 1:48 pm

4. I work for alorica which works for sprint. I am cust serv. and yes all the rants from previous reps about the working conditions are true, if u do ur job right u won’t get fired, if u treated people right maybe u won’t get cussed out! Right? Iv only worked for sprint 6 months and I probably know more then most the reps combined! especially the dumbfucks who don’t speak english! The training we get does suck but most of the problems in peoples accounts are fucking common sense man. I am stupid in a way though cuz I started service with sprint thinking I work for them and know how things go, (they can’t screw me over) WRONG (what the fuck was I thinking) first bill $400. charged for every text. (i had unlimited) Anyways as a rep my stats are all good, I actually resolve customers probblems, and I speak english! its not hard just do what they pay u to do and STOP BITCHING! customers wouldn’t call if they didn’t have a problem! And if u do ur job right it then it will make it easier for everyone! Sprint sucks as an employer and service provider!

   Comment by Anonymous — April 18, 2008 @ 4:23 pm

5. My bill is always wrong. After spending more than 2 hours on the phone, every month, for 3 months…I am done with Sprint. I was a customer with them for 8 years. My most recent bill was around $600. Since I cancelled my plan, they said that I will be billed for each phone that is on the plan (around $300). Their mistakes caused the the past bills to be incorrect…Sprint apologized about this until now. Now they say that I have to pay it because “too many adjustments have been made”. I am done! I am willing to pay my bill, but not for mistakes made by the Sprint company.

   Comment by Done with Sprint — April 19, 2008 @ 11:21 am

6. F. Sprint! Pure laziness on their part. All the retail fools care about are feature activiations, contract extensions, and accessory attach rates. They could care less if they ever fix a customers problem as long as they make the end of month quota. Anybody on this blog would be doing themselves well if they looked at another carrier in the top 3. I’ve never seen a company blow revenue faster, and their core business habits never seem to change. F Sprint!

   Comment by Anonymous — April 19, 2008 @ 11:34 am

7. I work for the Topeka, Kansas, Sprint call center (Alorica is the official name).

   I just want to point out that I sympathize for both customers who feel like they have been wronged with their bills and service, and for fellow call center agents who have to endure the stress of frustrating customers and the demands of an ever changing policy from upper management.

   Here is how our call center works.

   When I first began working there, it was during the interview process that the first thing they told us was “We will never expect you to sell anything.” That was a main driving factor in a lot of people deciding to take the job. I thought to myself “Good, I won’t feel like a telemarketer.” It was less than 2 months later that they began ranting about “Your job is depending on your sales. You have to sell and you have to sell with every call. You have to offer a feature or service even if you don’t resolve the issue. Even if their chewing you out over charges and demand to speak to a supervisor, offer them a Vision pack or Roadside Rescue.” I’m thinking “If this customer is disputing charges, then why would I offer them something that will cost them even MORE money, therefore angering them further?” This “Sell or Walk” agenda has turned off a lot of people to this company and has resulted in penalties against the agents because we’re pretty much expected to force extra features down a customers’ throats. By just not making an offer, you will be “coached” (in other words, bitched at). it’s come down to the point where some agents add the service to the customer’s account even after it was denied just to make the “Strategic Value” quota, resulting in supposed “bonuses” which the Team Managers stress so much; because most of the time THEY are the ones that get the bonuses and most of the just want the bragging rights against the other teams that they made more sales.

   Our Average Handling Time (the time we spend talking to a customer trying to resolve their issue) is what I believe to be a little over 8 minutes. It’s very hard to solve a customers’ issue especially when it can be very complex like a billing error for excess charges. I have an average handle time of under 8 minutes, but I get accused from my Team Managers of either dropping or releasing the call or transferring them. I have to get approval to transfer a customer, and of course ask them why they want to go to that particular department. I have to ask probing questions; example would be if a customer wants to cancel their account and want to be transferred to Retentions, I have to ask them why they want to cancel their service, when they’re yelling at me just to get them to Retentions already. After said tirade, I have to place the customer on hold, and wait for approval to transfer the customer from my team manager, which could take anywhere up to 5-8 minutes just to get the damn approval code to send that customer where they want to be, and I have to answer questions as to why they want to go there. If not I will be penalized. (By the way, if they say they’re transferring you to the Finance Department, it’s really the Collections department. Saying “Let me send you to Collections” usually results in an angry customer). It turns a 1 minute call into a 20 minute call, where we’re penalized for going over the requested handling time.

   The Team Leaders claim to be there for their agents, but I can say about half of them choose to wander the call center during its highest level of calls and some even say “If a customer wants to talk to me tell him/her I’m busy. I’m not in a supervisor call mood.” Any type of question you may have for the supervisor or “SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) will come with a quick “Look it up in our resources.”, even though you’re searching for one subject and you get about 200 solutions that have NOTHING to do with what you are inquiring about. I will say that not all Team Managers and SMEs are like that. Some will actually try to help you, but a majority of them get these positions and right away think that they have some special power over you. Some of them are barely out of or still in high school for crying out loud.

   The 6 weeks of training you are required to complete are a reprehensible joke. Depending on who your trainer is, my class’s training consisted of 4 weeks of looking at nothing but slides on an overhead projector in a classroom. The classrooms in this facility have no windows, and the trainers just stand in front of the class and verbally instruct on steps you have to learn, while following the slides. When it’s quiet and you’re in a room with no daylight, what’s the first sensation you will feel? Mr. Sandman meets a good quota in this building, and there have been trainees that have quit because of the training being so boring. The last two weeks you are taken deeper into the call center in what is called “Learning Lab.” Here you are supposed to get a more hands-on approach to how the systems work and you will be taking your first calls. This is also the time that results in the most people quitting, as they feel they are not ready to take calls yet due to the level of their training. I am sorry, but not everyone learns the same way; some faster than others, and all the information is pretty much thrown at you.

   This also leads to the process of Quality Assurance, or QA for short. The people in charge of “QA’ng” reps listen in to the agent’s calls from another workstation to evaluate the agent’s knowledge of the system, how they treat the customer, whether or not they made an offer or sale (not doing so can automatically have them fail you for that call), as well as call handling time. This is what frustrates a lot of reps aside from most QA reps exhibiting this aura that you should “fear” them and that they can make or break your career at this facility, it’s become more important to hurry up and get off the phone and to the next customer than to resolve the issue of the customer you are currently dealing with at the time. It took me an hour to figure out what someone did to this customer’s account one time, but I found it and fixed it and managed to keep a customer for the company. The customer even had the courtesy to praise me to my supervisor (a “Kudos” call as it’s known), instead I got docked for being on the call too long. Never mind that I fixed the customer’s issue, I would have failed the call had I been QA’d . One for taking so long, and another for not offering him something.

   Most of the time we have to follow a “suggestive script”. What it makes you sound like is a brainless robot. I’m not an actor, so I don’t follow scripts. You will fail a QA for not following a script VERBATIM.

   I’m going to touch base on a problem most of you bring to attention: the amount of times you are transferred to another rep, and the long length of time you are kept on hold. It’s not that I personally want to keep you on hold, it’s that’s how long it sometimes takes to get an answer that may be helpful to resolving your issue. While there are some lazy reps out there that just want to not help you, some of us actually care that you get what you need to continue your day. We know that many of you have important business or family affairs and that spending time on the phone with Sprint Customer Care is not something you should have to do, but we can only move as fast as the person answering us.

   I know most of you are thinking “If you hate it so much, then why are you working there?” Well unfortunately this place is the only guaranteed job in town (they’ve rehired people that have been terminated or resigned without giving proper notice). If it wasn’t for my wife and 5 year old daughter, I would not be there. The pay is semi-decent (when they decide not to screw up your hours), and it keeps the bills paid.

   The customers are not without fault as well. Some customers can be demanding when they believe they have been wrong. This billing system conversion has a lot of people in an uproar. We don’t make the rules, and if we can give you exactly what you want when you want it, we would as long as it solved your issue and everyone, rep and customer, walked away satisfied. But we have ever changing policies we have to follow which seem to change overnight, and it’s out of our control. Bill invoices can be confusing to read sometime, especially to those who have a hard time understanding English. It’s not very hard to go over your alloted minutes.
   The many issues people have with http://www.sprint.com are issues we have absolute NO control over. Hell, the system we use to access your accounts hardly works half the time. I’m sure many of you have gotten that “At this current time our systems are updating, please call again in about 4 hours.”
   The systems are actually not functioning the way they are supposed to be. It’s just an excuse to avoid supervisor calls and complaints.

   Most of us reps are good people just trying to live normal day by day lives. We have families with children to support and bills to pay. We have to keep the roof over our heads. We have to keep our houses warm and powered up with running water. We have to keep food on the table and in our children’s mouths and we have to keep them clean and clothed. That’s the main reason some of us work in this particular call center. It’s the power hungry egomaniacs that get some iota of authority that make doing this job more difficult with their hard to reach and ever-changing standards, when all they want are bragging rights like I mentioned before. I’ve actually had a customer offer me a job in New York in his stockbroker firm. I have no idea what to even do when it comes to stocks, but he was so impressed that i handled his issue when no one else would, that had I been able to financially make the move, I would’ve packed up my wife and daughter and done so.

   This job could be much more beneficial to both the customer and the rep dealing with the customer if things were so unnecessarily complicated with the system we use to handle calls and the arrogance of some of our higher ups that care more about stats than for customer resolution.

   Comment by Topeka, KS Sprint Call Center Rep — April 26, 2008 @ 4:57 pm

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