Outsourced

by Witchlight

I've just finished five and a half long years in one of the most depressing, soul sucking places you can be.

It's a place where the job you're hired to do is not what you're asked to do, where you seek out islands of sanity and watch for the enemy from without and within.  This is the outsourced call center.  Having spent as long as I have in one of these pits, I've learned quite a few things that I'd like to confess.  And I have a few tips to pass along as well.

The first thing you need to learn about these places is that the job you're hired to do has nothing to do with what you'll actually be asked to do.

I was hired to do tech support for a large ISP.  Sounds good, I thought.  I'll bridge my tech and my service skills and help people fix problems.  In training, you're told all the things that sound good.  The customer (referred to as cx for short) is your top priority.  Always do what's best to help the cx.  Empathize with the cx.  They love that word.  Empathy.  It's a mantra to the point that you'd almost believe that they want you to care about the cx... then reality hits you upside the head, and you're on the floor.

The floor is, of course, the call center production floor... row after row of computers with headsets where you are expecting to "help" people.  Here's the problem: Basic economics 101.  Tech support is a money losing venture to the ISP.  Hence the agent metric of a "talk time."  The amount of time an agent spends on the phone with one cx, both on the call itself and taking notes, is the total talk time.  This is the single most important metric the agent has.  Everything is based on this, from the agent's bonus to his ability to keep his job.  The longer the agent deals with one cx, the more the company is "losing" to that cx because the company has to pay you to help him.  So the faster you "help" him, the better.

There are many tools that you're expected to use to cut down your talk time.  You start with being dumb; the less you know, the sooner you've "exhausted all possible" troubleshooting steps.  After that, you escalate (see "Hacking Society," Summer 2008).

Some of the ways that the company accomplishes this is to hire people with no tech knowledge but lots of customer service skills.  These are people that they can train from the ground up to have no knowledge of anything remotely useful about the service.  These people are pleasant in nature and can make you feel good about the fact they are not helping you because they empathize with you as they don't know anything about the service either.

The other big method of reigning in talk times is to have very tight handcuffs... I mean support bounds.  So even if the reason the customer can't get online is because they disabled the DHCP service in Windows and you know it, don't tell the cx.  You see, that's an OS issue and not an ISP setting.  You, as customer support for the ISP, cannot recommend a change to the OS; the cx is told to call your counterpart at Dell where his support bounds will say system recovery.  The company's idea of "helping" is defined as referring the cx somewhere where his problems won't cost the company money.  Agents are punished for giving helpful hints to the cx.  This goes against my own idea of helping, as I believe helping someone involves actually knowing something and then sharing that knowledge with the other person.  However, support bounds are a necessary evil.  I have had cx call in and ask how to burn CDs, pirate material, set up a local network, and access porn.  What makes these people call their ISP for this is still beyond me except that, oh yeah, it's free tech support, and they think that we have to help.

So, what about quality?  Isn't cx satisfaction an important metric?  Well, that's easy.  Quality is based on saying certain things in response to the cx.  It doesn't actually have anything to do with meeting the cx needs, and it doesn't have anything to do with actually resolving the problem that the cx has.  Solving the problem would be first call resolution, which is almost never talked about.

Classic example.  Cx: "I'm pissed; your stuff sucks.  I want it fixed, and I don't want to hear I'm sorry!"  Agent: "I'm sorry you think we suck."  Repeat till cx hangs up.  In this example, the agent does exactly what will irritate the cx more, but quality guidelines say that the agent must apologize whenever a cx expresses irritation or dissatisfaction.  Agents tend to treat this more like a game.  The more we apologize, the more likely the customer is to get frustrated and hang up, thus accomplishing both high quality scores and lower talk time!

Some roles have tight scripts that agents have to follow.  These can be fun to play with.  The one that got a lot of play where I worked was the simple assurance to help statement.  When we asked the cx how we could help them today, no matter what the cx said, we had to say we'd be happy to help with that.  Even when we couldn't.  "I'd be happy to help.  What you'll need to do is call your OEM."  This could sometimes get awkward.  For example, I once asked a cx how I could help and she responded "I'm screwed!" to which I had to say, "I'll be happy to help with that!" ...awkward.  Following the strict script also sometimes forced us to give inappropriate responses.  My girlfriend, a fellow agent, once had a woman say to her, "Thank you for making me feel stupid," to which her script prompted her to reply, You're welcome!"

However, scripts can also be a way for the agent to tell you something he isn't supposed to tell you.  If you notice an agent explaining certain policies, it may be because he is trying to point out a loophole in the system.  He can't just blurt it out because of security reasons, but if you say the right thing then he would have to tell you due to quality guidelines.

What does this mean to you, the hacker?  Well, you know the old joke about how cops will write more tickets at the end of the month to make a quota?  Guess what, it happens in call centers, too.  In our center, an agent would get only four calls qualitied in a month.  If at the end of the month the agent has four good qualities and needs to shave a few seconds off his talk time for a better bonus, you'd better believe he'll reset that pass for you without checking if you're the account holder.

Now, if the agent bombs a quality, and he isn't going to get a bonus anyway, he doesn't really have to worry about getting a good talk time and can go way out of bounds to get you all the info you might need.  End of the month can be the best time to do a little social engineering.

There are also a number of security holes in the internal system of the ISP where I worked.  We used a site on the LAN for time off requests.  It would auto sign-in to your account based on your system logon.  You could request days off, view previous request, and cancel requests.  However, the URL had the request number in it, and if you entered a different request number, it would open that request without making sure you were the user who made that request.  So, if you wanted to take a day off on a day that already had the maximum number of vacation requests, you could find a request someone else made for that day and cancel it.  This would free up the hours so you could take that day off.

Normally, once a person saw his request approved, he wouldn't check again and would not show up that day either.  This would leave the company short, get the other agent in trouble, and leave you the day off.  There was also a place where people could explain why they wanted the day off, making a lot of personal information (medical, legal) available for anyone to view.

The quitting process where I worked had another major hole.

All you had to do to quit was send an email saying that you quit.  This email was not sent from any company email account that would verify your ID.  Agents didn't need email access at the company, and so they didn't have email accounts.  An email from any email address would work.  All you had to do was send an email that said "I quit" that included the employee's number, and they would be terminated.

The check-in system used each day by the agents made it very easy to find out a fellow agent's employee number.  In it, each agent's names and employee number was listed.  So if you were to email a resignation letter to HR on Friday (HR doesn't work weekends) as someone who was off Thursday and Friday, then that employee would show up on Saturday and be locked out, having already "quit."  Security would then ask the person to leave, as there would be no one in HR to speak to until the following Monday.  However, this would be really, really mean to do to someone, so even if this works at your company, please don't do it.

My advice is: if you work in one of these places, get out.

The whole setup is meant not to help people but to get rid of them.  The people you work with are, for the most part, dumber than rocks (nice shiny rocks, but rocks).  Friends are few in these places, so hold on to the ones you have; they keep you sane.  Watch your back... the company is always looking for a scapegoat when a cx gets really agitated.

Even if you followed policy, they will hang you.

There are, however, lots of things for the bored hacker to play with.