Someone Get a Robe for the Emperor! (Or, ‘My Husband, The Whistleblower’)
We work at a call center. We are mostly inbound, catalog orders, information collecting, brochure fulfillment, no-pressure calls.
We have, in the past year, and really building up in the past couple of months, added some more high-pressure inbound calls that require the rep on our end to do some ’sales’ work, trying to convince the caller to buy.
The client likes to see good ‘conversion’ rates on these calls. The operators are given incentives to make these ‘conversions’. Reps with good conversion rates are given bonuses, overtime, accolades. They are seen as kind of ‘golden’ and, somehow, don’t seem to get monitored as closely as the other operators. There is a kind of competition between our call center location and the other call centers locations in our company, to see which location has the highest overall rates.
A conversion is when a call gets ‘converted’ to a sale. The conversion rate is determined by comparing the number of calls that an operator ‘dispositions’ to the number of them that turn out to be orders. The operators are supposed to mark down (’disposition’) every call that comes to them. They mark whether it was a valid call, a hangup, a wrong number, etc.
Now, 3rd shift, where my husband is supervisor, always had lower conversion rates than the other shifts. He & his staff would get lectures, pep talks, re-education on the proper selling procedure, disciplined, in order to try to get their conversion rates up.
After the latest pep talk, a rep who was formerly on 2nd shift came up to my husband & told him that she was told by a supervisor on 2nd shift to only ‘disposition’ calls that she thought were going to be sales. Leaving non-sale calls out of the calculations for conversion rate. Therefore making the conversion rates absolutely meaningless.
DH looked up some stats on our ’switch’ - which counts the actual calls coming into our building & tracks where they go, to which operator & found that this was true. The operators with these amazing conversion rates were leaving a large percentage of their calls un-dispositioned. Some had over 50% of their calls not dispositioned. The conversion rate for some of the top sellers, if they had been recorded properly, would have shown them to be among the worst sellers in the building.
So, what do you do with this info? According to the rep who told him, Supervisors were in on this little subterfuge. The same supervisors who would be handing out the bonuses to the top sellers knew very well that they weren’t actually the top sellers at all. The same supervisors who would give negative monitoring forms (which can lead to termination) to the people with lower conversion rates knew very well that their ‘top sellers’ should have been monitored as closely, too. The same supervisors who sent lower converting sellers home early & kept top converters late knew that it was completely unfair.
And, how high did this go? Did the managers know? How could they not know? The numbers were so obvious. And, what about the other call centers? Is it going on there, too?
Jim checked with a 2nd shift supervisor, asked him if there was some kind of new policy about dispositioning calls that he didn’t know about, or if he even knew that this was going on. The supervisor said that he did know, but didn’t care because it made his numbers look good - made our location’s numbers look good - made our company look good to the client.
Now, what?
Well, last night, at about 4:30pm, he sent out an email explaining his concerns about all of this to the deparment manager, the call center manager, the office manager and the head of HR.
He hasn’t heard anything back, yet. People are not going to be happy to have this said ‘out loud’.
I am very proud of him, though. Just wanted to brag! He is overflowing with integrity and concern for his fellow man.
