JWhipple
New member
The company that I work for makes and sells software. The division that I work for concentrates on healthcare related applications, so, mainly hospitals and other healthcare facilities are the customers that we deal with on a daily basis.
I am the manager of a technical support team. My team is comprised of 18 team members, no supervisors, and me being the lone manager.
We staff 24/7, 365.
In the past few months for the first time since I started working here as a grunt, I dreaded coming in to work. I sat and thought about it for a while, and realized that there’s a lot that just “ain’t right” where I work.
Before I even consider starting to look for another job, I wanted to get some input from anyone else who works in the technical support field to see if what I am complaining about is common to every job, or if it’s just some crappy policies here. Also, would like to hear response from someone who would potentially be a customer for a company that would have these issues.
There are a number of issues that plague our group – most of which are call metrics.
We are expected to answer calls in 2 minutes or less. I can understand that one, as I have had to call technical support lines before and sat on hold for 45 minutes or more.
The problem though is that if everyone is on the phone, I have to make my employees put customer A on hold to answer the call from customer B. This is not by my choice – but rather due to mandates put before me by upper management. What good does that do? It put you in a situation where you could potentially already be working on a down server and then get another call with yet another down server. Now BOTH customers are going to be pissed – and rightfully so!
That’s just one of many issues. Here are some really hot ones that have got me a bit bothered.
Issues:
1) Staffing Levels. At the end of March, my team’s head-count was reduced by 2 due to “corporate downsizing”. This was immediately preceded by 2 persons having been terminated due to going onto long-term disability. Prior to losing anyone, our work-load was enough to justify at bare minimum of 10 more FTEs (full time employees). At this time we are pulling the weight of a fully loaded semi-truck with the power of a Yugo.
2) At least half of my resources are remote and obligated to go to customer sites for break-fix activities. Because of this, I can not estimate how many people I will have working towards accomplishing my team’s goals for more than 1 hour at a time.
3) Because of the staffing level issues, not a single person on my team is able to use all of their company allotted personal-time-off. We are allowed to roll-over 40 hours of PTO to the next year. The average member of my team had in excess of 90 hours left-over last year – 50 hours of which they lost and will never be able to recover or receive compensation for. To allow them to use all of their time would further reduce daily staffing levels to a point where we would add a few more rounds of ammunition into the gun we’re using to shoot ourselves in the foot with.
4) Constantly shifting priorities. This would not be an issue if we had the staffing levels that we should. Today our priority is hold times. Yesterday it was giving extra attention to customer X who is threatening to throw us out due to a problem that THEY caused and refuse to fess up to and then even though the problem has been isolated to something that we have no control over, they refuse to fix it. Tomorrow it will most likely be reducing the number of unaddressed trouble tickets that came in today that we never got a chance to work on because we had to concentrate on reducing hold times.
5) Software development is miserable. Our development teams are good at only one thing – working hard to avoid having to do work. Questions are responded to with questions. They have no idea how the software is used. They have no idea how the software is supposed to operate.
6) Software updates are only made when there are minor changes in code required. We have MAJOR bugs in the software that have existed since I started here 8+ years ago but when you mention these problems to any of the developers, you get the canned, generic response of, “We’re not aware of that problem,” even though it has been documented and escalated a bare minimum of 50 times in the last year alone.
7) The lies that are told to customers are inexcusable. At this moment, there are at least 10 customers that have been told by senior VP level persons, “We take this problem very seriously and it is our number one priority to get this fixed.”
8) Sales persons misinforming customers or ball-faced lying to customers to make the sale, then raising holy hell with technical support when we tell the customer the truth – “No, our application can not do that.” Nothing is done to reprimand the sales person(s) for this and it has been happening since I started here.
9) A service is sold to customers on the premise that it will alert us to any problems with their servers and allow us to proactively respond and address the problem. The last opportunity that anyone has had to look at these notifications is over a week ago, as we are too busy answering calls and doing everything else that we are supposed to do. So, we’re basically taking their money for a service that they aren’t getting. If we were to monitor these notifications as regularly as the customers are expecting us to based on how this was sold to them, we would effectively cut our phone coverage in half. Of course, this would make the hold times go through the roof!
10) The average person on my team is violating company policies prohibiting working during your personal time and prohibiting more than 40 hours a week of work. These policies make no sense to me, since we are all salaried employees, but your average Joe/Jane puts in 20-30 hours a week or their own time trying to help us accomplish our mission. No – we have no ridiculous mission statement.
11) Upper-management members are a bunch of save-asses. Regardless of how unethical something is, they will do it if it makes them look good or keeps the customer off their backs.
I am the manager of a technical support team. My team is comprised of 18 team members, no supervisors, and me being the lone manager.
We staff 24/7, 365.
In the past few months for the first time since I started working here as a grunt, I dreaded coming in to work. I sat and thought about it for a while, and realized that there’s a lot that just “ain’t right” where I work.
Before I even consider starting to look for another job, I wanted to get some input from anyone else who works in the technical support field to see if what I am complaining about is common to every job, or if it’s just some crappy policies here. Also, would like to hear response from someone who would potentially be a customer for a company that would have these issues.
There are a number of issues that plague our group – most of which are call metrics.
We are expected to answer calls in 2 minutes or less. I can understand that one, as I have had to call technical support lines before and sat on hold for 45 minutes or more.
The problem though is that if everyone is on the phone, I have to make my employees put customer A on hold to answer the call from customer B. This is not by my choice – but rather due to mandates put before me by upper management. What good does that do? It put you in a situation where you could potentially already be working on a down server and then get another call with yet another down server. Now BOTH customers are going to be pissed – and rightfully so!
That’s just one of many issues. Here are some really hot ones that have got me a bit bothered.
Issues:
1) Staffing Levels. At the end of March, my team’s head-count was reduced by 2 due to “corporate downsizing”. This was immediately preceded by 2 persons having been terminated due to going onto long-term disability. Prior to losing anyone, our work-load was enough to justify at bare minimum of 10 more FTEs (full time employees). At this time we are pulling the weight of a fully loaded semi-truck with the power of a Yugo.
2) At least half of my resources are remote and obligated to go to customer sites for break-fix activities. Because of this, I can not estimate how many people I will have working towards accomplishing my team’s goals for more than 1 hour at a time.
3) Because of the staffing level issues, not a single person on my team is able to use all of their company allotted personal-time-off. We are allowed to roll-over 40 hours of PTO to the next year. The average member of my team had in excess of 90 hours left-over last year – 50 hours of which they lost and will never be able to recover or receive compensation for. To allow them to use all of their time would further reduce daily staffing levels to a point where we would add a few more rounds of ammunition into the gun we’re using to shoot ourselves in the foot with.
4) Constantly shifting priorities. This would not be an issue if we had the staffing levels that we should. Today our priority is hold times. Yesterday it was giving extra attention to customer X who is threatening to throw us out due to a problem that THEY caused and refuse to fess up to and then even though the problem has been isolated to something that we have no control over, they refuse to fix it. Tomorrow it will most likely be reducing the number of unaddressed trouble tickets that came in today that we never got a chance to work on because we had to concentrate on reducing hold times.
5) Software development is miserable. Our development teams are good at only one thing – working hard to avoid having to do work. Questions are responded to with questions. They have no idea how the software is used. They have no idea how the software is supposed to operate.
6) Software updates are only made when there are minor changes in code required. We have MAJOR bugs in the software that have existed since I started here 8+ years ago but when you mention these problems to any of the developers, you get the canned, generic response of, “We’re not aware of that problem,” even though it has been documented and escalated a bare minimum of 50 times in the last year alone.
7) The lies that are told to customers are inexcusable. At this moment, there are at least 10 customers that have been told by senior VP level persons, “We take this problem very seriously and it is our number one priority to get this fixed.”
8) Sales persons misinforming customers or ball-faced lying to customers to make the sale, then raising holy hell with technical support when we tell the customer the truth – “No, our application can not do that.” Nothing is done to reprimand the sales person(s) for this and it has been happening since I started here.
9) A service is sold to customers on the premise that it will alert us to any problems with their servers and allow us to proactively respond and address the problem. The last opportunity that anyone has had to look at these notifications is over a week ago, as we are too busy answering calls and doing everything else that we are supposed to do. So, we’re basically taking their money for a service that they aren’t getting. If we were to monitor these notifications as regularly as the customers are expecting us to based on how this was sold to them, we would effectively cut our phone coverage in half. Of course, this would make the hold times go through the roof!
10) The average person on my team is violating company policies prohibiting working during your personal time and prohibiting more than 40 hours a week of work. These policies make no sense to me, since we are all salaried employees, but your average Joe/Jane puts in 20-30 hours a week or their own time trying to help us accomplish our mission. No – we have no ridiculous mission statement.
11) Upper-management members are a bunch of save-asses. Regardless of how unethical something is, they will do it if it makes them look good or keeps the customer off their backs.
- my laptop is my desktop at work, converted my workstation into an ESX server 
