Technical Support Point of View - Technical Support Advisor Sage Employee Review

All staff, including those who are technical leaning and even from academic backgrounds are expected to make and increase sales. Over the course of the last year this has become mandatory, and indeed, it's even possible to lose your job by not having enough sales leads convert. Excellent at customer service? Whiz kid with computers and software? Sorry, not enough sales, out you go. Targets are generally impossible to hit consistently and don't take into account individuals circumstances or issues that are completely out of the control of call agents. You can actually get put on a performance plan if enough customers complain about queue times and mark down your CSAT. Even though the problem was fixed and the agent did everything that was reasonably practicable, or if they didn't like the answer they got, or the fix they were given (even if it was the correct answer). If they'd been messed about all day and you were the last guy to help – and fixed it – but they sent a bad survey for you, that's just bad luck. Colleagues are forced to cut down average handling time, and as such the customers lose out. This is probably the single biggest problem. A massive number of calls we get are from people who've already called us that same day (or week), who could have probably had their issue fixed first time around, if the first advisor was incentivised to see the problem through to conclusion. Because of the constant pressure to reduce handling time, agents rather than trying to help resolve the issue, most of the time are looking for the fastest way to end the call, regardless of whether or not the issue was resolved. The most common way to do this is to 'offer an article', which is fine, if the person you're giving it to is receptive to this. But most customers are not, or will accept it, and call back several more times because they didn't understand it, or because the steps on the article didn't fix it. Normally it's because they didn't understand. There's a huge push for customers to 'self serve', which is shocking really, considering how much they pay for technical support, but what's worse is many of the people who call are not capable of following the instructions in the articles we send out, many processes are not 'that' simple, and sending someone off (if they don't immediately want to speak to a manager when you try and palm them off) often results in that same customer calling back several times, becoming frustrated, losing trust in the brand and leaving or having their opinion of us permanently damaged. As an aside to this, assuming for a moment, that I agreed with technical support staff having a 'converted leads' target, everyone seems to be totally ignoring the obvious contradiction between AHT/CPH and Converted Leads.