Spectrum reviews

So, so many. Training was poor. It mainly focused on learning policies, pricing, and how to handle a lot of uncommon situations that rarely came up out on the floor. Conflict management and call de-escalation should have been a major focus but were limited to part of one afternoon. Policies were constantly changing, even during training. Things like how schedule adherence worked, how to check channel lineups for a particular area, and how to view our metrics were completely skipped. Our instructor was constantly telling us we could be fired for things that we later learned were not in fact fireable offense like taking an ebreak to use the restroom or issuing courtesy credits for disputed service call charges. The helplines and escalation lines are often understaffed. You have to call in and wait for a superior to become available and you have to check in with the customer every 60-80 seconds. That might not sound like a lot, but it wasn't uncommon to wait 20+ minutes to get a lead/sup on the line and checking in with a customer 10+ times to say the exact same thing tends to irritate them. You could only escalate a call for the customer behavior if you gave them two warnings and then you still had to check in with them every 80 seconds to get attacked repeatedly while waiting for a lead/sup. Additionally, while many of the leads and sups were great you basically had to justify yourself to them every time you asked for help by confirming what resources you used and what de-escalation tactics you tried. Escalations were tracked and often had to be justified to the supervisors in coaching sessions. Coaching sessions were rare and generally consisted of criticism and nitpicking of metrics or the rationale behind credits issued weeks before. There was no time between calls, so there were a lot of times when you'd go straight from a caller raging at you and calling you names to your next call. Breaks are scheduled for specific times, and every minute you're not logged into the right category counts against you for schedule adherence. Everything was broken down to a metric, your average call time, your after-call work, your customer satisfaction surveys, first call resolution, etc. It was almost impossible to hit the (very high) targets that were set without sacrificing customer service. I went over a month straight with nothing but perfect customer survey scores, and significantly lower than average call times and still got the ominous lecture about needing to improve my performance because my hold time and ACW were to high. Management was always pushing everyone to increase productivity. It makes you always feel like your job is in jeopardy and makes it a really stressful working environment. As a result, retention rates are terrible. They are constantly hiring and run multiple training classes at the same time to keep the seats full. Our class had meetings with the billing manager when we hit 1, 3, and 6 months on the floor, and by the 3 month mark less than half of us were left. The starting wage is low and there is very little opportunity to increase it.