Inside the Cable Company – Whistle blowers

If you ever wondered where all the money for your monthly cable is going…its not to training employees.

Below are excerpts from an article that was originally published on the website Gizmodo under the title “Comcast Employees Spill How Hellish Life Is on Their End of the Phone” by Ashley Feinberg.

Article Excerpts:

“We’ve all had that maddening phone call with a sales rep who just won’t quit. What you might not realize is that as we’re slamming our heads against our phones, they are too. It’s not they won’t stop, but that they can’t stop—and they hate it just as much. Here’s what life is like on the other end of the line.

With paychecks at stake, when Comcast sales reps want to vent, they have to do it anonymously.

While the above might sound extreme, it starts to make a lot more sense when you realize what these employees are up against.

We spoke to the retention call center employee above (who has chosen to remain anonymous) about what working conditions are really like. And this isn’t a singular case; according to the employee, quite a few Comcast workers are actually on mandated medical leave for mental health issues specifically related to the stress of the job.

Apparently, much of the stress stems from training, or rather, the fact that “training” hardly exists. As the employe explained:

• The”nesting period” during training is when we start to take our first calls in the training room before we are seated out on the call center floor. One of the supervisors or senior reps (or advocates, as they call them) was supposed to sit with me, and then she just disappeared, leaving me all by myself to take my first calls. At my previous call center job, when new reps were taking calls, a quality auditor or coach ALWAYS sat with the new rep to assist them. It feels like Comcast throws you to the sharks.

Mix a lack of properly trained employees with as little oversight as possible, our anonymous employee says, and you have the perfect recipe for infuriating phone calls:

• Things only got worse when we were put on the call center floor, as there is even less help there. They do have a team of people that are dedicated to help the reps, but there are only about 4 or 5 of them, compared to the call center population, which is around 500, which is not a good ratio.
  The supervisors that are on the floor were not promoted from a representative, they are hired directly as supervisors, so a lot of them don’t really know the billing systems very well, and haven’t really dealt much with the customers directly, making it difficult for them to help the representatives. And on top of that, things got even worse recently, as they are pushing for us to sell at least 2 lines of business (phone, tv or internet) per day. This is extremely difficult, as, being in retention, the majority of our customers are at their wits end with Comcast, the last thing they want is a sales pitch, and 90% of the time, offering more service ends in the customer becoming more irate than they already were.”

Its a long article on Gizmodo, but worth the read.