Slashdot Mirror
US Call-Center Jobs — That Pay $100K a Year
bheer writes "BusinessWeek profiles a call center company called iQor which has grown revenues 40% year-on-year by (shock) treating employees as critical assets. It's done this not by nickel-and-diming, but by expanding its US operations (13 centers across the US now), giving employees universal health insurance, and paying salaries and bonuses that are nearly 50% above industry norms. The article notes that outsourcing will continue and globalization will continue to change the world's economic landscape. 'But the US is hardly helpless. With smart processes and the proper incentives, US companies can keep jobs here in America, and do so in a way that is actually better for the company and its employees.' Now if only other companies get a clue as well."
A phrase I saw in the summary almost had me sending a note to timothy from the "See any serious problems with this story? Email our on-duty editor" link, then when I RTFA I saw that it was word for word from TFA: "IQor also gives its U.S. employees universal health insurance".
A meaningless phrase, I think. The words "health insurance" suffices; universal health insurance is what Canadian and European residents get from their government. Bad writing at the least, which lead me to suspect that there were bad facts as well. However, most of the rest of it seemed well written.
Sure, some companies, such as Dell (DELL), have moved call centers back home after customer protests.
Makes it look like the customers are protesting outsourcing, when in fact what pisses most people off is that the offshore phone monkeys are completely unintelligible. If you're handling calls from Mexican customers, your call center workers should be able to speak fluent Spanish, not bad Spanish like I speak.
The best of iQor's front-line call-center workers make more than $100,000 per year.
What's the starting wage? TFA doesn't say.
And unlike many of its competitors, and an increasing number of other U.S. companies, iQor offers all its employees good health insurance and generous benefits packages.
Some time in the early 1980s, the head of one of the airlines (that ironically became a union airline later) said "any company that gets a union deserves one". Treat your employees like shit, and they will treat your customers like shit, and may even organize a union.
IQor also invests in technology designed to make its employees more efficient
Gad, there's little I hate worse than robocallers. When I say "hello" you better echo my "hello" PDQ or I'm hanging the phone up. You called me; don't put me on hold as soon as I answer without even responding.
From TFS: But the US is hardly helpless. With smart processes and the proper incentives, U.S. companies can keep jobs here in America, and do so in a way that is actually better for the company and its employees.
That assumes that today's busiesspeople aren't so greedy and stupid that they're like the monkey who has his hand stuck in the jar, too stupidly greedy to let go of the treat inside. A pretty unwarranted assumption, I think.
Free Martian Whores!
Why can't I do the same thing in another country and pay less?
This is how the small business I work for operates. They treat employees as a vital resource and asset. They know they invest a lot of time and money to hire and train us so they compensate us well according to how well we help the company make money. They know that without the people doing the work the business wouldn't make money. It's how companies used to operate and imho how they should operate.
Sure in the lean times we don't get the nice bonuses we are used to but we get to keep our jobs because they don't squander away money when times are good because they know bad times are coming.
Common sense that seems lost in this day and age.
What industry finds call center work so valuable that they can pay iQor enough to pay its employees so well?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
You can dress up a pig, give it makeup and perfume, but it is still a pig. Giving telemarketers decent pay and health care doesn't make the job any less vile.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
1. Call centers are in the more depressed parts of the U.S. I have a sneaking suspicion the workers are happy-ish to be there, but aren't part of a healthy middle class.
2...U.S. employees universal health insurance. What kind? PPO. I'm tired of hearing this topline chant when the details of the policies are depressing.
3....and pays salaries and bonuses that are nearly 50% above industry norms. So, are the call center workers still the working poor?
4. The best of iQor's front-line call-center workers make more than $100,000 per year The best one serving an uber-tight niche. More spam.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
The CEO of this company was born in India!
I think it says something very nasty about U.S. corporate culture that it takes an immigrant the see value in hiring Americans.
So if I am on the call with a "support representative" for 1 hour, it would cost them $52 in raw employment costs?? What type of service could possible afford this structure other than the financial services industry??
They dont outsource because they are evil. They do it because they are trying to reduce the cost of things.... Yes, the model is flawed, however, and I suspect that in 10 years a computer will be the new support representative. Then I can tell it how bad I hate the company it works for while not feeling bad about it...
I won't name names, but one of our competitors does this. The down side, they over-inflate their prices to the customers to compensate for 6 digit salaries for sales people. They are lucky to be in a business where they can pull this off because of the complexity of pricing, but as with any market, the margins get thinner and thinner and they just won't last.
Quote: "But the US is hardly helpless. With smart processes and the proper incentives, U.S. companies can keep jobs here in America
.
Managers rarely care, and even more rarely, have the technical expertise to handle labor decisions in ways that benefit themselves and the country. Their entire focus is getting that next bonus. If they have to move 75% of their operations to lower Slobbovia to do it, they will, rather than spend the 15 minutes of googling and thinking that would allow them to do the job more efficiently and cheaply in the USA.
.
Unfortunately, in the USA, most managers have MBAs but nothing else, an education which seems to leave most of them with the ability to do almost anything financial except understand and run a business in real time.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
When you hear about these compensation packages the execs are getting, it makes you wonder how far that could stretch if divided equitably amongst the workers.
The sad truth is that people don't seem to want to pay more for quality, they'll only pay more for fashion. When Macs were sold based on their utility, they eventually lost out to the up and coming Wintel systems that weren't as good but were a whole lot cheaper. The Mac CEO at the time was advised to cut the price and he said "No, people will pay for quality." No, they didn't. Not enough of them. And Mac didn't really make a comeback until Steve Jobs made them sexy again, made technology dance to the same tune as fashion. Suddenly Apple is chic and cool and people are happy to pay ridiculous gobs of money.
Go figure.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
You know, if you treat your customers right and treat your employees right, you don't need (or want) to work off of price.
Just look at Nordstrom.
I remember a similar story in 1998, when I read an article (I still have clipped) from Fast Company Magazine (http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/21/sanity.html) where they were exceptional to their employees. They had free onsite daycare, free clinics, a mandatory gym...
As a result, they were reported to keep thier employee turnover rates down, had happier customers and saved a bundle in the long run.
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
They moved their first call center out of Austin not because their employees were demanding high wages, but because they'd so pissed off everyone even remotely technical in town that they couldn't hire anyone in the first place.
The great thing about following Dell is at least you know you're going to go into bankruptcy really, really slowly. I guess that's a business plan.
In addition to these benefits, the company also offers world peace, satellite launches, and ponies.
No wonder companies are outsourcing if all USAsians think they have to be overpaid that much.
Apparently you missed the bit where they said they were deliriously rolling in piles of money because they treat their people right and get high quality work in return.
...just ditch the regulations that drive companies overseas in the first place - minimum wage, and regulations based on political pull (e.g. govt-union partnerships), for starters.
I know at IBM, most mainframe operators (including myself) made over $100k. It wasn't that hard. IBM just worked us to death, and paid us time and a half over 40. When you're working 12-hours a day 7 days a week (84 hours), the dollars add up ($27 RG, $41.50 OT). Add in the fact that I worked the night shift at the time, so I literally couldn't spend the money I was making. I left after a few years.
I imagine a call-center like this is counting those 6-figure salaries in the same way. They pay their top employees to work 70 / 80 hours a week.
Google the title. I agree that any company that gets a union deserves one.
Those great salaries are likely paid to the employees most willing to berate someone into giving them their kids lunch money.
I work for a subcontracted dispatching company for Dish Network technicians called Linkus, and I can honestly say customer service would be a Hell of a lot better if they actually paid us more for the bullshit we have to deal with on a daily basis, and stopped trying to fit more tasks in for us to do on top of the already horribly busy day. As it stands, it's a dollar over minimum an hour to work a 10 hour day of listening to yelling customers, angry technicians, recording stat information from jobs, and making a precall just to say "Hello, your technician is on his way" and get some customer who wants to share their life story, which sucks because you cant hang up on them. Most of the time we don't even bother to call customers when a tech is running a bit late because it's just a solid bitchfest, and the pay isn't worth it, aside from the constant "do this or we're going to fire you!" attitude of the managers. Systems set up to treat employees like cattle seem to only work decently in other countries, which just makes me even more angry with whoever makes the decisions on how to run things, and whether to outsource or not.
Much like the rest of the IT industry, mediocracy will become the norm and rewarded with ever growing salaries until the business becomes unsustainable and goes under. HR, diversity requirements and threat of lawsuits will not allow for an elite class of worker who makes exorbitantly more money, forcing the bar to be lowered.
That's what the company is offering to pay for specific jobs in the call center, not what is being demanded for entry level. There might only be one or two people getting that total.
Collectors get a commission on what they collect. They frequently break the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, bully people into paying things that they don't owe, and in some cases, outright fraud - demanding a checking account number and then taking everything even if it's more than what's owed.
If you've already made a decision to provide crap customer service (an MBA would call it "minimizing service cost to the extent feasible"), it is cheaper to do this from locations with low labor costs. Most companies still prefer to provide crap customer service, and if you call almost any company selling cable, wireless, credit card, satellite, ISP service, banking, or insurance of any kind this is what you're likely to get.
I presume that iQor is working with clients in high-value segments where high-quality customer service still matters. At this point, such a market is relatively small. There's no doubt it costs more, because you have to be able to retain the good reps, which means you can't put as much pressure on them to meet quotas, and you have to pay them more, and generally put up with things like doctor visits and bathroom breaks that drive down productivity. And you have to hire managers who actually know how to manage and motivate people. Compared to low-wage offshore locations, you end up paying 10x or 20x as much per call (I'm guessing).
The wireless places and the banks and credit cards aren't, at this point, willing to do this. They model how much churn they're going to get, and what it will cost them, and decide that it isn't worth it. So it's a niche, where if you've sold someone a $20,000 injection molding machine or something, you feel more compelled to have someone on the phone who can actually figure out when it's going to ship.
I'm not convinced that that changes anything, because niches by their nature do not scale well.
And I don't think that my cell phone company is going to start having live humans making $30 an hour answer 611 calls on the second ring, either.
Unless this is a completely different iQor(I don't think it is) then they aren't exactly a call center. My company creates software for use by clients and collection agencies and they are one of our collections agencies we work with.
Our cable company (Rogers) decided to bill us for a non-existent mobile phone account, apparently because the phone subscriber's last name and ours were similar. Spent months talking/fighting/threatening Rogers to get them to cease attributing these bills to us, and we finally succeeded.
Fast forward 6 months, and all of a sudden we're swamped with 5-6 automated voice messages daily (!) from Iqor. They'd obviously bought the bad paper and were trying to collect. I called them back and explained the situation, and the nice, reasonable, well-paid agent said they would clear it up internally and stop contacting us.
Fast forward another year, and we've only recently stopped being harrassed by these dirtbags. It was an unending litany of lies from their agents, off-hour calls, up to a dozen automated calls per day, etc., etc. Only when I asked them for all documentation pertaining to the alleged debt, their legal Canadian address where they could be served, and declared my intent to file suit and/or lodge complaints with every authority I could contemplate did they finally manage to stop the calls.
Rogers and Iqor - a fucking scumbag match made in heaven!
Even HP/Agilent have lost their way after the founders left. Back in the 50's-80's when the founders still called the shots they valued people (down to the janitors), treated them well, and fostered an environment that was aimed at excellence (i.e. you were inspired to keep up with your coworkers, not constantly dragged down to their level). Once the MBA's got in charge it has been steadily downhill.
The lure to cut costs vs. the hard to quantify benefits of nurturing employees through creating a rewarding work environement is one few business majors who have not come up through the ranks can appreciate. Sadly it feels like virtually all corporate cultures have succumb to the dark side.
I used to work 60 hour weeks happily, but having been outright screwed by too many MBA driven nickel and diming fiascos I no longer do. I work my 8 hours and go home, keeping my head down the whole time. I pour my creative juices into home projects instead of unrewarding work ones (3 industrial sewing machine actually come close to the fun of microwave IC design, who'd of thunk?).
I hope one day people will realize that most executives (in publicly-traded companies) DON'T have the companies', the investors' or the employees' interests at heart. Most of these executives gained their position due to crafty manipulation and NOT by actually, really improving a product or product line, increasing profitability or market share. But they were and will be always great at presenting their (short or very short term) results in the best light possible, and excellent at knowing and manipulating the right people.
This breed of executives will outsource to poor countries (thus providing a short-term, fleeting increase in margins), lower salaries and/or fire employees at home (thus providing a short-term, fleeting increase in margins) and eliminate R&D and products/services (thus providing a short-term, fleeting increase in margins) - which will look good for a short while. Long enough to get a new promotion or a job at another company, after cashing in.
Please do yourself a favor and have a glance at this book.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Any well-run company is going to pay their top earners more.
I once worked at an IBM call center (occasionally taking calls FROM India, and why I don't know) and after it was all said and done, I and all of the other employees there 'made' about $25.00 an hour. Our clients included a company that made medical equipment for burn wards, several restaurant chains, a couple insurance companies, and Apple. (For some reason.)
We saw, depending on how generous our contractors were feeling, between $8.00 and $11.00 of that. (lol Manpower) It was never more than half of what IBM was actually paying per hour, and with the call center's massive turnover (due to abject mismanagement at every imaginable level) very few people got to come close. After I left, the base pay rate declined. Some of their positions are now literally minimum wage, as per the new minimum. The contractors - the people IBM outsourced their HR to - take most of the money IBM puts up for each person, and I've heard they haggled the price per head down to the previously mentioned $25.00 an hour due to the high volume of people at the center.
The benefits from the contractor were slim to nonexistent, and they were typically very slow to answer important questions or, you know, send me my damn paycheck. The contracting company - the 'headhunters' mentioned in the article - makes a goddamn killing. A gargantuan goddamn killing. Manpower has hundreds of people at that call center, each earning them between $10.00 and $15.00 an hour give or take when you subtract the non-pay benefits. They're making millions from that site alone, and IBM is all too glad to shovel money toward them. The call center, in spite of being a last refuge for the Rust Belt's unemployed and one of the worst workplaces imaginable, is astonishingly profitable for IBM - and they closed three other call centers to open it. That's right. It was a consolidation of three profitable call centers into one big one with far fewer staff than the rest put together, further lifting their bottom line. (Some of the people sent to set it up came from far out of state, and also informed us that after years of dutiful service with practically no advancement they were being laid off after the new center opened. True story.)
So yeah, when you call for support and get routed to a call center, that call costs a pretty penny, and that's just for the people answering the phones. If IBM kept its HR department in-house it could afford to pay employees a heck of a lot more and get better equipment and training materials too, but by holding the call center up by shoestrings and screwing the employees in the process, they walk away with fatter wallets and fewer liabilities. As a result, the work environment is piss poor, their infrastructure is unreliable, their employees are unmotivated and usually leave within six to eight months, and said employees have barely adequate training to handle what were some very difficult clients. (We had to log into company intranets and do all sorts of data entry and account management for them as well, which was a lot more complicated than it sounds, in addition to technical support covering many dissimilar clients.) Yet they still make money, boatloads of it, which then set sail for Asia.
I can believe iQor's story and I hope to your deity of choice (or chance, if atheist) that their business model becomes the norm. I can't begin to describe the god awful experiences I've had with CSRs that either didn't want to or didn't know how to do their jobs, and actually investing in these people instead of treating them like second class citizens or disposable answering machines could rectify these problems. I know a lot of IT bigwigs will balk at this, but forget everything you've learned about the workplace since 1980. Until we get fully sapient androids to do all of our work for us, the most important asset in any domain of your workplace (especially ones that interact directly with the customer) is not the technology, it's people.
This whole offshore call center crap may, as a practical matter, push Congress too far one day. Which is to say, push (us, lower-case note) Americans who vote for cretins too far one day.
Sooner or later a power-hungry politician will come along and note, loudly and rhetorically, that some businesses are turning into giant wads of foreign money using computers and hirelings to harass Americans by phone call, from outside the country.
What happens then is anybody's guess. If I could insert an "eating popcorn" emoticon here, I would.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
These $100k phone jobs aren't, "How do I plug in the VCR?" support.
As somebody else pointed out, It's collections and sales. That's a totally different beast from what most geeks think of as call-center.
These 6-figure people collect or sell 7-figures. They are not informing you that the router is down, or giving you the IP address for the mail server.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
If you can stand the mental torment, the pay taking cancellation calls at Sprint call centers starts about about 45k a year and tops out at 80 to 90k if you are good and do 20 to 30 hours of overtime a week. Before the scam was exposed 3 years* ago AOL call centers taking "retention" calls pay also started at about 50k and topped out over 100K for those willing to do heavy amounts of overtime.
* http://consumerist.com/191878/timewarner-dissolves-aol-retention-centers
http://sprint.jobsincallcenters.com/
Minimum wage *is* set at the state level, and the effective minimum wage is the higher of the two. This is probably a good thing, as some states have excessively low minimum wage laws. (Kansas is currently $2.65) Source: US Department of Labor. http://www.dol.gov/esa/minwage/america.htm
are the works stuck on scripts, call time cut off? People who have no idea about who they take calls for / what they are supporting.
When I call direct tv most of the time they do a good job but you do get the 1-2 call where the person on phone does not know what they are doing.
No wonder companies are outsourcing if all USAsians think they have to be overpaid that much
What do Asians living in the US have to do with it?
Free Martian Whores!
Happy workers => Happy company => Lucrative business
I do not need a PhD on Havard to see this...
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
At the risk of losing karma...
Offtopic is actually correct in this case. If it was a Troll, it would be attempting to incite people to disagree with vitriol. That's clearly not the case. Just as clearly, it has nothing whatsoever to do with call center jobs (at least I hope it doesn't). Thus, offtopic.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
We always talk about that "sad truth" that people won't pay more for quality ... but it tends to come up in the context of one costly item or another that didn't make it. It ignores all the successes. I think the closest thing to the truth is, people will always be tempted by the promise of an "outstandingly good value". We've got numerous businesses today that primarily hawk junky, but low-cost goods, while trying to put a false front of "quality" on the front of the whole operation. People get swindled into buying the lower-cost stuff, with false promises that it's really "just as good as the more expensive version".
People *will* pay more for quality, but they don't want to accidentally pay TOO MUCH for that quality either.
Since you want to drag up the ever-popular Apple comparison, I'll bite with a story of my own.
A while back, I wound up gutting apart my Core 2 Duo P4 full-tower PC clone because one of my best friends needed some repair parts that happened to be just what I had in my system. I figured I'd sell him what he needed, eventually sell some of the rest of it, and just simplify things by getting myself a new "all in one" type PC to put on that desk. I've already slowly switched most of my computer gear to Macs, ever since I worked for a guy who had an all Mac office, and got hooked on OS X ... but decided to go with an HP TouchSmart all-in-one, in this case. After all, it had an actual touch-screen on it, which no iMac has, a kind of cool ambient backlight on it, and so forth. It was even around $200 cheaper than a comparable iMac. So hey, a "deal is a deal" right? No point falling into that trap you mention of paying for "style".
Well, it didn't work out like that at all.... As soon as I went to take the back cover off the TouchSmart to upgrade its 320GB drive to a 1TB SATA I already had lying around, I discovered the shoddy workmanship to the machine. Plastic clips broke off the first time I snapped the shell apart after removing the screws, and the case developed a small crack in one corner when I snapped it all back together. (This thing is obviously not designed to come apart more than once or twice without needing a whole new outer casing!) The computer makes annoying rattling sounds from its cooling fan too, and when I tried to upgrade it to Windows 7 from Vista, found out HP's touch-screen applications software doesn't even work right in 7. The bluetooth mouse feels cheap and eats batteries quickly, too - and to top if all of, the integrated Intel video is SLOW. I would have had a vastly superior machine if I just went with the Apple iMac (better video by a mile, aluminum case instead of cheap plastic, etc. etc.), and I could have set it up to run Windows 7 just fine if I so desired.
So claiming Apple is all about style but not quality, because quality didn't work out for them in sales? Nah... not buying that one. Apple figured out it's best when you do BOTH together.
I recognize the Chairman of iQor as a past president of First USA Bank.
Those bastards were unrelenting in giving my info to telemarketers selling Field and Stream magazine and other stuff I didn't want.
I remember the name because I tracked down his office phone number and called him personally every time I got an unsolicited message. The calls went on for over a year because they had spread my info so far and wide.
Fuck you Randy Christofferson, fuck First USA Bank, and fuck iQor.
If there are two places where a job can be done and in one of them the costs for labor are less than the other place, the job is going to be done in the low-cost place. Period. There is no stopping it. We have spent the last fifty years or so building international trade so that goods and services are can flow to low-cost places.
If you currently work in a job that can possibly be done in some low-cost country, get used to the idea of doing something else. Because the pace is accelerating. When the worldwide recession is finally over you will see it move even faster.
Manufacturing is dead in the US and Western Europe. Most jobs that can be done in a cheaper place are being done there now. No amount of hand-waving or talking about happy employees is going to change this. No employer can afford not to pay attention to this, because today cost of labor is the number 1 cost of just about anything. And every move by US and Western Europe politicians to do things like introduce "living wage" laws will just push this faster and faster.
What most people do not understand is increasing the costs of labor in the US isn't going to make for a better life for lower-class employees. What it will do is put them out of a job, permanently. Maybe the government can do a better job of supporting them on taxes while their former jobs are done in low-wage countries. Maybe not. We are about to find out.
(From the "apply now" link on http://www.iqor.com/. Emphasis mine)
To get started, all you need is your:
- Name
- SSN/SIN or Personal Identification Number or National Insurance Number
and you are ready to start!
Good luck!
WTF? A chance to work for $100,000 per year, with no college, and all they need is your social, or some other piece of Identity theft bait?
> Horrors are tens of millions of people with no right to healthcare, how can this even be up for discussion?
I agree, how can we even have a discussion about some mythical 'right' to healthcare? Hint: It isn't a 'right' if it requires the enslavement of someone else. Doctors and the rest of the healthcare industry are not required to serve you. You do not have a moral claim on their services.
This is the problem with all of the new progressive 'rights' they kee on inventing compared to real human rights. To illustrate, free speech is a fundamental Right possessed by every human being, regardless whether they live in a hellhole that oppresses them. But the right to speak does not give me the right to demand a printing press be given to me, it doesn't include the right to storm into a speech being given by someone else and demand a turn at the microphone, etc. It doesn't include an obligation on you to even listen to me. But Freedom of Speech does imply a right to listen/read whoever the heck you want to.
Regarding health care you have a Right to trade freely with anyone you can come to a mutually agreeable deal with. Any government that interferes with that right is oppressing you to varying degrees.
And there aren't tens of millions of Americans without health care. That is a lie invented by the progressives to try and scare us into doing something stupid. The number they throw around is usually 47M. An instant with Google gets this:
---
The Breakdown
The largest, overlapping, groups of uninsured in the US include:
* 9,000,000 Millionaires
* 27,000,000 people who make more than $50,000 per year, but choose not to get insurance
* 22,000,000 Young adults who can afford insurance, but choose not to
* 14,000,000 People who can already get medicaid, but choose not to
* 11,000,000 Illegal Immigrants
* 23,000,000 People who are actually insured. That's right; you've been lied to...surprised?
This adds up to more than forty seven million, because of the overlap - for example young adults who are millionaires and change insurance companies fit into four categories, above.
---
And anybody can walk into an emergency room and get care regardless of their ability to pay, that is Federal Law. Dumb perhaps but it is our current law. Of course since we don't have universal health care you can usually go to an emergency room and get to see someone before you die, unlike the routine horror stories coming out of the British press.
Democrat delenda est
Okay. But what if they took those same "smart processes and proper incentives" and transplanted them to India? Wouldn't they end up with the same quality at a fraction of the price?
No, that's what "Flamebait" is for.
Troll: Regardless of the content of the post, was made with the purpose of adding "noise", to break the forum, to generally make the place less-relevant to its purpose. This one should pretty much never be used, unless it's very obvious (like GNAA, CmdrTaco's penis, etc), since a truly well-crafted troll is generally indistinguishable from a very well-written post, while the only thing really distinguishing any other post from a troll post is Intent.
Flamebait: literally "baiting flames". Saying something with the intention of starting a flame-war. In some circles, this includes saying something which you should have known better than to. (even if abortion law is entirely relevant to the topic, some would consider it flamebait to mention it). If you don't take that line, however, this one is also entirely down to the intent of the poster, and so should never be used.
Off-topic: Any other post which is not relevant to the original topic, no matter the quality of writing.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
A wise manager I once worked for said "why do we so rarely do the right thing ? Because its the choice that typically requires a bit more work."
Its not the years, its the mileage
Running a business involves many skills & knowledge groups. Administration is one subset of those skills. Compare to the difference between certified in a technology (MCSE for example), vs. being experienced & qualified in an functional role (Microsoft server admin).
I use the following rule:
Flamebait=an obnoxious post whose author actually believes what he's saying and is trying to make a point, but could not manage to do it without being a jerk.
Troll=an obnoxious post without any such earnestness.
Hard to judge sometimes, of course. Also, I find that using this rule most flamewar-starting posts are actually troll, not flamebait. C'est la vie.
I've never called tech support for anything other than completely defective products that needed to be replaced under warranty. Why? Because they're completely useless. It's incredibly rare to get anyone who knows more about the specific product than you do, and in the meantime you've got to deal with lame "first 30 seconds" fixes.
If tech support centers had well paid people who were paid to know the product inside and out, I think that'd be really neat.
It's been a long time.
Wow, so you just ignore the commonly accepted definitions of terms and apply them as labels to be viewed by everyone else.
Enjoy eating your dresser tomorrow morning before you head off to soap, it really is the most important shoe of the day!
However-- a significant driver in these changes are that the customers are really competing on cost. Customer service would matter for a handful of people, but the price is the biggest factor. Question is-- are you willing to shop around and spend more on a cell phone company that has competent support? For most people, unless they are burned by one company, they won't (and if they were, they just go to the competition who uses the same support reps).
+1 Disagree
TFA: "In the past four years, iQor employees have referred more than 7,000 people to HR, and the company has paid out over $1 million in referral bonuses. Motivating a workforce to take referral bonuses seriously enough that management can replace headhunters is impressive."
Seastead this.
Makes it look like the customers are protesting outsourcing, when in fact what pisses most people off is that the offshore phone monkeys are completely unintelligible. If you're handling calls from Mexican customers, your call center workers should be able to speak fluent Spanish, not bad Spanish like I speak.
I might be off-tangent here, but from my experience with overseas call centres operators, they speak perfect English. The only difference is that they sometimes don't speak with your same accent, though some companies are training their operators to speak with a specific accent. English is my second language, and I believe, like many people who speak more than one language, we have trained ourselves to listen to the words and not how they are said. From my observation, this is a big problem with monolingual English speakers. You have been so used to not paying attention and just picking up familiar sound patterns instead of words, that you have difficulty parsing a different accent. Not putting down anyone here, just saying that this is how we humans operate.
Every person outsourced to another country to work is a drain on our economy. These people are not buying goods made in America, they're buying Japanese and Chinese or local goods. This is the same for factories etc. Every job lost due to this is replaced with a lower paying job in most cases and in a good number of cases no job at all. This reduces sales of products and services in our country and these companies who started this mess are too narrow sighted to even know they are creating a bigger mess as things progress. At least illegals spend some of their money in this country and it's about a billion dollars that gets sent down to Mexico, compared to trillions that are sent overseas for all kinds of things.
This is not about protectionist or anything. It's about doing things that make economic sense for this country. We are slowly being drained dry by countries who are undercutting our workforces, but at the same time refusing to trade with us. Free trade is a scam, it's nothing but an excuse for people in power to fool those who do not know better. Ask any American farmer about "Free Trade" and he'll tell you a story or two.
Is it any wonder that we've had two severe recessions in the last 10 years. This is not about a cycle, there is a endemic problem in how our economy is being abused by big business. Some of these rich could care less if this country crumbled to dust, they can just move. The rest of us cant.
It's incredibly ignorant for people to keep claiming that Apple is all style and no substance. It's like the BOFH attitude: claiming that everybody in the world is a sheep and an idiot. People and consumers are smarter than they're given credit for.
If a product sucks and doesn't work as well as others, then its sales will certainly suffer. No amount of superficial bling will turn that around.
Apple is doing incredibly well because they make great products. That's their "secret" to success. I think other companies would do well to emulate them, rather than engaging in silly "races to the bottom" with prices and quality which seems to be all too common nowadays.
iQor is providing good jobs for Americans in places where those jobs are needed. However, we must be careful here. In reading the article, iQor is depending on their employees having (or developing) a strong technical background. They are also happy with their low turn-over rates.
If you prefer people with a strong technical background, you pay high salaries, and you want to decrease turnover rates, you risk falling into the same H-1B- and foreign consultant-hiring trap which many technology companies have.
I hope I am wrong.
-Todd
Omne ignotum pro magnifico.
Welcome to the American dream... capitalism not doing it for you?
Every person outsourced to another country to work is a drain on our economy. These people are not buying goods made in America, they're buying Japanese and Chinese or local goods.
Actually, it's quite the opposite. The richest areas are those that spend most money. If a company's shareholders are in America, they spend their money there. In fact, if a company hires a foreign worker, it is a disadvantage for the foreign country, because part of the profit now gets into America (the owners of the company), and will not stay in the foreign country.
You perceive outsourcing as a problem, but it's really about distribution of wealth. Instead you should perceive as a problem that the America itself gets divided and the wealth gets distributed more unevenly. But on the country level, America _profits_ from outsourcing, because it allows you to use cheaper workforce to provide all the services than you would have to otherwise.
So you're saying it's "on topic". Wouldn't that make it flamebait?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US Call-Center-4