As a CER, we were asked to do a tremendous amount of work for the customers. I was genuinely surprised at the responsibility handed to us. We had to function as accountants, waste regulatory specialists, and contract experts on top of being expected to be generic customer service representatives.
All of this for $17.25 an hour? And that was generous of them; Apparently, some of the CERs that had been hired-on before my ‘class’ was making 12-13/hr.
I worked there for almost two years and was never offered a raise. Of any amount.
CSRs are micromanaged spectacularly, with an ENTIRE department devoted to reviewing our calls and nit-picking. Yes, every job like this can expect that… but we were under-staffed, with some customers waiting 15-20min to talk to us some days. Throw the quality folks on the call floor.
In an effort to alleviate some of the staffing issues, about half the calls were directed to a contracted call center in the Philippines. I can’t tell you how many customers I had hang-up on one of these individuals and call back just to talk to someone they could understand. Meaning; The very thing that was intended to spare us some work actually created more of it.
It became increasingly obvious that basic, low-level customer service was going to transitioned to the Philippines call center entirely.
The company is absolutely awful actually servicing their customers. Drivers missing or skipping stops was about 50% of my workload. Drivers forging the customers’ signatures of manifests.
The company is heavily reliant on the fine-print within contracts, raising prices annually after a two-year grace period. The customer was locked-in to said contracts for usually five years.
I saw some absolutely insane — and I do mean insane — pricing. And it was my responsibility to explain this to irate customers.
When you are, apart from the drivers, the ONLY public face of the company, you’d think they would want to keep us (CSRs) happy. But there was never any effort to do so. Take your practically minimum wage salary, endure the micromanagement, and do more for US.
What about that system ‘upgrade,’ moving-on from Salesforce? How’s that going? It was always “right around the corner…”
