| TeleTech Holdings, Inc. |
| TeleTech was actually a company I worked for, rather than one I did business for or with. They are an outsourcing company that does work for Fortune 500 companies. They are ISO 9000 compliant (at least in theory). I started working for them the end of December '98. I worked on the GTE INS (InterNetworking Services) project, attaining a rating that was consistently in the top third to fifth amongst the project's agents (I consider some of the highest rated agents to be seriously lacking in professional customer care skills, acting more like a robotic clearinghouse for customer issues than anything) of which there were over 300. TeleTech likes to start projects such as GTE INS in major cities and then move them to other cities where the cost of employing people is much lower and this was no exception. In April of '99 the director of the project announced that the project was moving from Thornton, CO to Birmingham, AL and that they would try to find positions for all of us on other projects. Those who wished could move to the new location. I didn't wait for things to end. I noticed that it was already dying - they stopped posting stats and other things. I applied for a new project called CLARA and got a position as a confirmation agent. The project was run by a rebellious guy by the name of Michael Holt. The project was actually for COVAD Communications, the leading, privately-owned supplier (at the time of this writing in December '00) of consumer and business DSL services in the US. The project had started in April of '99, 4 months after COVAD went public. The name CLARA came from COVAD's home location in Santa Clara, CA. Michael started out as a trainer. He might as well have been the operations manager from the start - he pretty much did that job, too. I started out, at the end of May '99, as a confirmation agent, calling up customers to confirm installation appointments with them. Several days later I was moved to ordering DSL lines from PacBell. A week later I was moved to ordering from USWest (now Qwest). A couple weeks after that I again moved, this time into Customer Care. I rapidly became, if not the fastest, one of the most knowledgable agents on the team. When two positions opened for lead agents I secured one of them. I worked long hours fulfilling my position and sacrificing my personal life. My primary responsibility was to handle escalations given to me by the team on orders that were stuck for one reason or another. I was responsible for screening the escalations to make sure they went to the proper place and then making sure the team that was to handle them actually did. Sometimes that was a challenge because the agents didn't always understand where an escalation needed to go. Some of the agents should never have been put on the customer care team. In reality the agents didn't have the power to do anything to an order other than make informational changes and updates. All escalations were handled by ordering and service delivery. Michael had been officially promoted from trainer to our (CC) supervisor and an ops manager was brought in. Time passed and Michael got the operations manager position. I was chosen from a group of applicants as his successor. It was a challenging job and very stressful but I stuck it out, despite misgivings, and I think I did a pretty good job. I never had enough agents to handle all the calls (I don't know why the training department didn't try to keep up with demand) and sometimes I even got back on the phones. Michael was a very dictatorial person. He would berate people in front of others. He also would use information to his advantage, twisting it and passing it off as his own accomplishments. At one point in '99 I was helping to support my mother and realized the salary I was earning (about $27500) was not only inadequate to properly support her but was also far below what I should earn considering the work I was doing. I went to Michael and told him about my situation and that my choices were to stop working overtime (which I was doing a lot of) and get a second job, quit and get another job, or ask for a raise. Two weeks later Michael announced in a supervisor meeting that he had gone to bat for us and gotten us all a raise to $30000. He didn't mention the impetus I provided. He always worked things that way - when it was bad news it was someone else's fault, when it was good news he was the reason for it. He used information in whatever way he needed to to reach his goals. To be fair he wasn't all bad - when I asked him for help and advice he was always willing to give it to me. TeleTech has standardized rules and regulations for all of it's US locations but Michael was constantly going against what they demanded. For a long time we had our own special set of rules. Eventually they made him toe the line but that was around 8 months after the project started. In the meantime we had to deal with his abrasive personality. Dealing with COVAD was also very stressful as there was a lot of infighting, finger-pointing, buck-passing, back-stabbing, etc. I often had to protect my agents from that flack. Worse than Michael, however, was TeleTech's own unfair treatment of employees. While the pay they offer for most jobs is better than you'd get from most outsourcing companies in the Denver area they don't seem to care about employees unless they are protected by laws like FMLA or EDA. This was blatantly obvious given the special treatment they gave some of the employees. Eventually I got very burned out supervising the Customer Care team and Michael moved me over to the Bell Atlantic ordering team. Right after my move came into effect he quit. Shortly before this, however, our director, Phil, and other top management for the project pulled us into a meeting and warned us that if we didn't start cracking down on attendance and other issues they would personally write us up. I took that seriously. I took over the nightshift supervisory position and worked in conjunction with Kenny Mitchell. Two weeks later Kenny was forced to resign. I then found out that he had not been following up on Phil's edict which put me in the unenviable position of having to punish all the people he'd let slide. However, despite the edict and info we'd been given in supervisory training, when I tried to fire or write up certain people neither my manager, Chuck, nor HR would back me up. In fact, on one occasion HR actually denied what they'd said in training. I was under a lot of pressure because the two shifts I was supervising were composed mostly of lackadaisical employees who wanted to work the system as much as possible and do as little work as possible. I was also stressed by management and HR refusing to back me up. Finally, I applied for a training position and told Chuck that if I didn't get that job I wanted to be demoted back to an agent in customer care. I trained a few classes for the project, the training manager who was evaluating me let me keep doing this and said good things about me but, when I'd ask him what was going on, he kept blowing me off and giving me lame reasons why he couldn't make a decision. For instance, he told me he had to repost the position because COVAD wanted a trainer with sales experience to which I pointed out I had that experience but he still said he had to repost it. Another month or so (probably two months after the original posting) I still hadn't heard anything from him about the job and no one had been hired. I asked him what was going on and, when he gave me another lame answer I told him to forget it, that I wasn't interested in playing these games anymore. I also told Phil to please demote me. I trained my replacement and quickly went back to Customer Care, handling emails and such. Very shortly after that I was issued a warning for "harassment". I don't know who I offended but I was told more than one person complained. I had always tried to be careful about not harassing ANYONE, even telling my trainees to be very aware of this problem since America is overly-sensitive about this issue. I told the supervisors who were reprimanding me that I never intended to harass anyone and asked them to apologize to whomever it was. The next day my former agents in the BA team were being really noisy and the lady who replaced me wasn't doing anything about it. I was already in a bad mood because of the reprimand and so I phoned the supervisor and left her voicemail saying "Tell your agents to shut the fuck up." That quickly earned me a second warning. A week or two later I was unofficially made a lead again, handling email and escalations, but I was never given a commensurate raise in salary or official position. I tried to talk to the project manager, Katherine, about some problems that I was having on the project and she said she'd look into it. Later, when I asked her about it, she said she'd been too busy but would soon. About 1.5 months later I asked her again and she said the same thing. I tried talking to the ops managers about the problem but they couldn't/wouldn't help me, either. I finally ended up giving verbal notice to one of them that as soon as I found another job I was leaving. That's exactly what happened - I found another job, went on xmas vacation, and when I came back I quit. Perhaps, in retrospect, I could've given them notice. But, then, given their policies I would've immediately been escorted out anyways to make sure I didn't do anything nasty. What's the point of this long-winded rant? Basically, it revolves around the directives we (the supervisors) were given by our bosses who then, along with HR, refused to support us when we tried to enforce them. Further, the run-around that we often experienced was a real let-down. I don't know - perhaps I just have "sour grapes" and I've no legitimate complaint but I have other stories I've excluded (like the friend who applied for, and was granted, vacation but when he returned he was written up because they lost the vacation sheet). I will say that Teletech is OVERLY afraid of harassment situations and will just about conduct a witch hunt if they get spooked. |