Top down the support centre is mismanaged. Bottom up the staff are not trained or empowered.
There is zero support resources, real and figurative. If you are not an encyclopaedia of hvac, thermostat, wifi, iPhone, Android and web app knowledge you are set up to fail. You get a 3 week crash course in the above, but the curriculum is out of date, your notes are wrong before you hit the floor and you spent a lot of time on irrelevant things. It’s “sink or swim” and a “tough love” office - these are leadership quotes. The management “knows what I need” to grow. They keep promising it will get better “once we have grown,” but we can’t grow because the attitude is to work harder than is possible not smarter and burn people out long before we can add new, knowledgeable staff. This is the machine they made. It hires you, grinds you into dust, takes all your will and then you quit.
Your work day starts with a micromanagement meeting where they ask if you read your email like checking your homework at school. If you did you’d see that the old overly complicated process for something has been made more complicated because the old one wasn’t working. There’s no opportunity for questions here. You can ask them, but you won’t get answers. Your supervisor doesn’t have any answers about these emails. Nor will they. Nor will they get them. If you follow up with a supervisor, you’ll be told to “just make something up.”
You then strap in for 8 hours of back to back calls with people angry they waited hours to speak to you, hours for you to call them back or that they were promised a callback that never happened by a previous agent hours ago.
Breaks? What are those? There are no breaks. There’s more calls in queue. You’re here to take abuse: From customers and the management. You don’t get breaks. Need to go to the bathroom? Ask permission like school again. Keep in mind your supervisor can say no. There’s more calls in queue.
Lunch? 30 minutes. Did you go over by a minute? You are being be chewed out. There’s calls in queue.
During your 36 remaining hours of constant abuse, what happens if a customer has an issue too complex to solve in 15 minutes? What happens if the line at the QA desk is too long or the people who can help aren’t around/quit? You can’t help that customer then. You literally can’t. You’re not allowed to. There’s more calls in queue. Your supervisor is telling you to get this customer off the phone, NOW. “Tell then you’ll research it and get back to them.” Will you? No. Not because you don’t want to, but because you have no time to. There’s more calls in queue . You’re now a liar, so the numbers look better for the management. Customers don’t matter. There’s more calls in queue. Everything just piles up as you are shoved more and more tickets even when you’re not done yesterday’s.
So your week’s now over. 5 days in a row of this. What if you don’t like all these pending issues with customers pressing you for answers and updates every day you promised to research, but never could? If that matters to you, then you’d better stay back or spend your weekends on it (unpaid - you can only get dollars for talk minutes, there’s more calls in queue).
Next you get your two (maybe only one) days off to think about the terrible decision you made applying at Ecobee. The worse decision you made believing their lies in the interview about this being a positive places and your financial responsibilities that stop you from quitting without a new job first. Then it’s back to work to do it again. FYI it’s an overly complicated shift system covering 7 days a week, 16 hours a day. It’s not consistent. You’ll never sleep right again. By the time you’ve adjusted to your schedule, it’s changed again.
If you try to make suggestions to improve things you are punished. They lie to you and ask for feedback, but it’s only to see who still has any will left in them that needs to be broken. So you lie and say things are fine. Just like you lie to customers. Because the management forces you to.
Every positive review for the call centre was written by the management. We have even been asked to write reviews. No, they did not mean honest ones. They want lies, just like the internal feedback and just like the things you “make up” to customers.
