After over 6 years the job has become increasingly stressful and difficult. - Tech Coordinator Verizon Employee Review

Almost too many to name, but there are the top 5 in my opinion. 1. Unfair survey based performance system. The majority of our performance is based on customer surveys. We normally get a max of 12 per month. The customers get the automated survey call a few minutes after speaking with you. Each survey is broken into 2 categories "ERP" and "Rep Resolve". The ERP section is scored 0 - 10. Anything 7 or below counts as a 0%, and anything 8 or higher counts as a 100%. It takes about 11 good ERP surveys to make up for 1 bad one. This process is also very misleading because customer will give a 7 thinking that it is an above average score, when in fact it was the same as giving them a 0. Rep Resolve is more straight forward as the customer is asked to score "yes/no" depending of if you resolved the issue that you called about. This survey system has created a "pass the buck" culture at Verizon Wireless where reps who are dealing with an angry customer or difficult situation will be more likely to transfer the call to another department, or escalate the call to a supervisor to pass the survey to someone else so they will not get it. All of this has made the job very stressful for many employees. 2. The constant push to drive sales. In the technical support department the majority of our calls from from customers who are frustrated because their expensive device/service that they pay for is not working correctly. They are usually not interested in being up-sold by someone who should be trying to fix their current device instead. To make it even more difficult, Verizon Wireless has added things like the $30 upgrade fee, the discontinuation of the "New Every Two" discount, and The requirements to lose you unlimited data features. All of these make it that much more difficult to convince customers to buy a new device with a 2 year contract. To make it worse, the only phone upgrades that count towards our performance are when a customer moves from a basic phone to a smart phone or a 4G to 3G phone. This makes it very difficult to hit the target of 1% upgrades per call that they ask for. 3. "Commitments". Even if you are meeting all of the requirements for you performance agreement (surveys, phone upgrade sales, average calls per day) Verizon also chooses for commitments for you to make. These can be as vague as "sound happy on every call" or "make customer aware of offers". This is basically their trump card they can use to put you on corrective action even if you are performing or leading according to the performance agreement. Once you are on corrective action you are not eligible for career progression, your annual raise, or the annual STI bonus. Interesting how that works huh? 4. Vendor Call centers. Verizon Wireless has a net gain of new customers every year. The biggest year was when they purchased Alltel. Even with this growth they have still closed quite a few Verizon-owned call centers around the country. To handle the huge call volume they have taken on more and more vendor call centers. These are 3rd party companies that take calls under the name Verizon Wireless, but earn about half the pay, and get about one-third the training that internal employees do. They are constantly making mistakes and giving out incorrect information. This ruins the customer experience, and causes unnecessary stress for internal employees. It seems by doing this Verizon Wireless has put saving a few dollars on labor costs over the value of a good customer experience and good employee morale. 5. negative reinforcement. You are constantly being told about what you are not doing right. If its not your survey scores, its how many calls you take in a day, how much time you take between calls, phone upgrades, extra bathroom breaks, how often you transfer, how many accessories you sell, and the list goes on. In fact you have so many stats to meet, and things you are told to do and say in each call, that it is nearly impossible for you to not have "opportunities" that they will want to discuss with you during your weekly coaching session. They do this to make you feel like you are only doing just good enough to keep your job and that corrective action is one small step away.