| Annie,
It's not Verizon who is hiring. Verizon contracts with another company who does all the hiring, payroll, payroll taxes etc...this way Verizon pays one bill to the contractor normally at least twice what the contractors employees are paid. But Verizon doesn't have to provide the health benefits, or match the payroll taxes etc..so it's less expensive for Verizon.
The contractor agrees to provide the able bodies, and in order to keep the contract does what they think necessary to give Verizon the numbers they want to the detriment of the customer. Most of the staff the contractor hires are undertrained, and that is not due to Verizon either. I know Verizon takes great pains to provide ample training material and make it available, where it goes from there who knows, obviously it doesn't make it to the majority of the reps or the turnover is so high they can't keep up with the training.
The call center I worked for was that way. Poor training and HIGH turnover and low pay. If you had a suggestion on how to make things better it was more often ignored than implemented.
I'll give you an example. One of the projects I worked on was for a telco that was starting an isp. The program manager who I love dearly was actually given carte blanche, but soon the call center management started putting pressure on him to lower the numbers as far as "talk time" and we explained to him that in order to "fix" the customer and prevent them from calling in repeatedly with the same problem it took more than 2 minutes which is what they wanted. He argued with management over this and was vetoed, but he had hand picked all of us and we were determined to do the best job possible for the customer. they eventually fired him not because he couldn't make the numbers they wanted but because he was exceeding the profits and they just knew something was wrong..so they replaced him with a moron and the whole crew jumped ship over to the tech support team of an ISP. Served the jerks right....although we all felt bad about leaving the ISP and the customers in the lurch... |
