Alice in Government Land - Part 5: Monitoring

This has been of month of petty monitoring issues for me. All call centre agents need to be monitored for quantity and quality of calls, and I have been monitored for both.

Quality monitoring is supposed to happen across several calls every month, but until a few days ago I haven't been monitored for 2 and a half years. It is a dreaded process because a perfect report is nearly impossible, and focus is always on the negative. This time however, I got a "satisfactory" rating, the zenith of management's positive feedback. They did find 2 criticisms. At the end of one call I forgot to ask "Is there any other government service I can help you with today?". It is our official closing, although the answer is always no, since we are only trained to do the one service we do.

The other complaint was that I told I client, who admitted he had not worked or paid into our pension plan for 20 years, that he definitely could not qualify for disability benefits. He would need contributions in 4 of the the past 6 years at the time be became disabled to allow his application to be considered and he had none. He asked for a clear answer and expected that answer, but management said I can never say for certain that someone is not qualified. There may be "mitigating circumstances". In other words, there may be 4 years of contributions that I could not see, although contributions can only be made by working. Whatever. Given that they decided I did not need "retraining" I let it go.

Quantity monitoring is done by machines that measure our call averages and percentage of each day we spend on calls (adherence). Reports are given to us on a weekly basis. My adherence is consistently around 98% while the national standard and my call centre average is 92%. The average call length nationally is 437 seconds and mine is 419.

Call length is made up of 3 parts: pure talk, on hold time and not ready time (the time spent working on a call after a client hangs up). For years, national management has been pressing us to keep clients 'live' instead of putting them on hold or doing the work after the call is over. In these regards, I am the poster child of phone agents for my hold and not ready times are the best in the call centre I am told. Naturally my pure talk time is longer because of this, but overall I am still almost 4% better than the national average.

But monitoring is focused on the negative. Four weeks ago my previous team leader (I have had 4 different ones in the past 5 months) was not satisfied that my pure talk time was longer than the national average in spite of the overall picture being stellar, and exactly the profile management has wanted us to achieve. She wanted me to reduce my pure talk time 40 seconds per call without increasing either my hold time or not ready time. In other words, she asked me to set a goal to reduce my call length to a full minute below the national average. I agreed to reduce my pure talk time in the wording of the "goal" but made no mention of not increasing my other times.

Besides being unreasonable and a threat to the quality of the service to my clients, there is no way I can legitimately be found wrong for having a call average equal to or better than the national average. If management fired everyone who had a call length average greater than the national average they would logically lose half their staff. So I agreed to the goal and am now putting clients on hold or finishing the work after they hang up to reduce my pure talk time, the expressed opposite to what management wants, but exactly what I have been asked to do. No sweat.

There's no reward or acknowledgment for doing my best working for the government. I learned this years ago. I do it out of a sense of personal pride and a sense of loyalty to my clients. I refuse to talk like a robot to discourage conversation or not to investigate fully benefits my clients might not be getting just to keep my call averages shorter. I just keep my head down under the radar and play the stupid games that management requires of me. I am a call centre terrorist, just a ghost in the machine.

And they wonder why we are cynical!


"Today is the first day of the rest of your pay period." - Luke Warmwater