Toxic work environment - Customer Repair Advisor TDS Telecommunications Employee Review

Heavy focus on metrics. They tell you not to worry about stats and just do your job, but the metrics are outdated, work against each other, and can punish good advisors for taking the time to solve the issue. Just a few unlucky calls per day can easily push stats below acceptable. Goals are high (adherence does have a "generous" 93% but WILL be below compliant if one runs over your lunch - and call volume is usually constant so this happens easily) and a lot of stats can be decimated just by bad luck. Negativity from customers and low employee morale - difficult and sometimes irate customers are unavoidable, but TDS could avoid a lot of these situations. Repair often felt like retention; the amount of "customer service fluff" (the forced, scripted politeness rampant in so many industries) is nauseating, and agents are expected to treat EVERY caller as if they're on the verge of switching providers. Even a "hey guys, my service came back up - you can cancel my appointment" demanded an apology on penalty of a failed quality assurance score if that call got pulled. Communication between call center and field techs was slim to none, so all parties were often left in the dark on next steps to resolve issues that didn't fit in the neat little box of simple issues that could be fixed by following a checklist. Both the repair department and field services are chronically understaffed, so customers often had to wait and questions on needed maintenance or upgrades often went unaddressed. As a result of the scripting and service issues, customer and employee morale alike suffers. Everything has to be escalated or approved - upper management is overcautious and restrictions on access for front line repair could be crippling, both for the flow of the call and for the queues. Security precautions are important, but advisors were required to escalate most requests that went beyond a password reset - often technically simple tasks that could be done fairly easily - which increased customer hold times and tied up the lines for senior advisors. At the level of call volume in repair, this could have a domino effect leading to long hold times all day.