"Just stop being so damn picky!" Larry growled at the wide-eyed man with the crewcut. The man gathered some strength and shot back, "You will not curse at me! You and the GM agreed we would follow these policies! Do you want to lose this account or what?!". Larry turned away and didn't respond. The tall crewcut bowed his head, turned and stalked down the stairs finally disappearing from sight.

One of our larger corporate customers that manage several large investment funds have advised that they aren't pleased with the way we have been handling things lately. I've seen management worried before, but they are truly losing their cool about this.

They have been firing off memos faster than a belt-fed machinegun. More serious than that, there was a company wide management meeting lately, and they chose one of the people from our vast customer relations department to oversee every transaction and trade by this customer. This new "Customer Service Czar" will either shoot you an email nastygram or physically come to your desk and tell you if you messed up the trade, or mis-handled an informational call, or screwed up the billing on a transaction with this very important customer.

The thing is, the Czar is not trying to make us do something new. All of the things that they want us to do are already on the books. They want us to fill out all of the fields, keep the customer informed about the cost and what happened after the trade, and to protect ourselves, management wants us to get the names of people that we deal with in case they contest any charges.

Larry, my floor supervisor, and one of the guys that has been there a long time, appeared to be towing the company line at first. He was yelling at us when we did not fill out fields or do something half-ass. But he is not used to this kind of precision in handling calls, it's causing things to slow down and take twice as long. After a nastygram and a personal visit, he finally snapped at the Czar.

Before this, the old-timers were used to taking calls non-stop and handling them as fast as they could without stopping to get the details straight or really find out what the customers wanted done exactly. The idea was to answer the calls and let the details take care of themselves. Customers didn't complain that much, because there weren't as many options then, we were one of the only games in town.

Besides Larry finally rebelling against this need for real customer service, all of the other old timers are complaining because their call volume is down because, GASP!, they actually have to do things correct the first time. Cry me a river. They have been getting patted on the back for too long by management for doing things just half-way. Finally, maybe they are going to see the idea that quality and quantity are not synonomous.

Signing off for now with a smug look on my handsome face and a stained coffee mug in my hand, I remain the protector of truth, quality, and utter humility here in Call Center Purgatory,

Yours sincerely,

The Anonymous Cog.


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