I made a journal for my writing stuff :3  the journal is featheredlover for anyone who feels like checking it out :3  it has most of my wips on it as well.

Customers of Fido who call into Customer Service frequently make comments that Fido is ripping them off, whether it be with the system access fee, or a high bill for things they claim they didn’t do. What they don’t know though, is that this is a two-way street. Fido is not only ripping off it’s customers but also it’s employees.

I am a Fido Customer Service Representative, or CSR, I and everyone else in the call center that I work at are scheduled for nine hour shifts a day, out of those nine hours we are only paid for eight. We have two fifteen minute breaks that we are not paid for, and one half an hour lunches, in which they expect us to go get out lunch, get it ready, and eat it, and then be back on the phones.

When are are paid we are usually cut a bit, some of us calculate how much we’re supposed to have on our cheque for the work we put in, even if it is only eight hours that we get paid for, and usually we’ll see that we’ve been cut $50 off out gross pay. I know $50 isn’t a whole lot, but when some people have bills and medical expenses, that $50 could be very useful.

We endure a month and a half of training, one month in the class room and two weeks on the phones, in which time we’re supposed to have a senior agent with us at all times, that only happened for half a day and we had two days with our fellow trainee’s. So for seven and a half days we took calls on our own and scurried to floor support on every call, making the calls longer than they needed to be by at least five minutes.

When we are trained we have two tests and two evaluations, the pass is 80%. Everyone in my training class passed. Then we were trained for a new program that Fido has begun to use, it’s called ICM. The old one was called Vision21. It has been discovered that ICM is a Rogers program, that their agents use for their accounts and we later found out the ICM is not compatible with the program that our phone is, it’s called StarPhone if anyone is curious, so it frequently crashes. I haven’t spoken to one person yet who hasn’t had ICM crash in the middle of a call, forcing them to transfer the customer to another representative, or have them call back later. We have experienced several center wide crashes due to the incompatibility of this program with our systems. Back to the issue now, when we were trained for ICM the class was two days. Two days to relearn everything that we had needed a month to learn to begin with. Several people did not pass the test for ICM, when you fail you’re supposed to retake the test, and if that doesn’t work, they’re supposed to retrain you. No one retook the test and no one was retrained.

There are several trainers who spend the majority of training yelling at the trainee’s. Human Resources is frequently not at the center. We have no paid sick days. If we take a day off because of illness then we are asked to ‘make up’ the time. The majority of the supervisors do not know what they’re doing and either cannot answer the questions that CSR’s bring them or give the wrong advice. Supervisors are usually not taking calls which is all the more frustrating when a CSR has an irate customer demanding to speak to a supervisor and they have to explain that they’re not taking calls.

As a CSR we do our best to help a customer when they call, what the customers frequently forget is that we are not the company. Prior to their call we had no idea they even existed. It’s incredibly hard to try and be compassionate with someone who is yelling at you because they have an issue with their bill, it’s even more frustrating when people begin to demand credits on their bill. A CSR is allowed to give up to $50 in credits per call, if they so desire, they do not, under any circumstances have to give them away. If a customer is treating a CSR as though they are lower than scum and then demands a credit it can almost be guaranteed that they will not receive it. Adjustments are done to bills when they are needed, but other that the majority of CSR’s will not give someone a credit.

Many CSR’s have medical issues; whether it be with pain, migraines, one I know could quite possibly have MS. The stress of our jobs do not help these problems and infact usually make them considerably worse. I know several people will read this and say "You knew what you were getting into when you took the job." And that is true to a point, when we didn’t know when we took the job was that not only do we have stress from customers who are rude and irate but that we would also be getting it from the company as well. A person should not have to fight with their work place for a month to get paid. A person should not have to quit their job because they got jumped and their pay cheque taken and Human Resources decides that they don’t need to put a Stop Payment on the cheque that was taken.

I’m not saying that CSR’s need to be treated like gold, far from it, if someone has a legitimate complaint then by all means, call Customer Service, any CSR will be more than happy to help you out to the best of their ability, what I’m saying is instead of yelling at them like it’s their fault and they personally wronged you remember that there is a living person on the other end of that phone, they have not done anything to wrong you, they’re just doing their job.

I am a Fido Customer Service Representative, I have taken some bad calls, I have taken some good calls, I have taken calls that have left me in a fit of tears at the end, I have taken some calls that have me in the brightest mood I could ever possibly be in. I have taken crap from the company and the customers; I am a human being with feelings, needs, and wants. I have the capability to love, to cry, to hate, to laugh, and everything in between.