BT pays compensation to MoD for faking performance figures BT has paid over a million pounds to the Ministry of Defence for faking performance figures in one of its call centres. The telco had several targets to hit, one of which was how long it took to answer, and successfully complete calls. If it failed to answer calls within a certain time they lost out on payments. In order to …
I am sure this "faking of performance figures" is happening a lot in the Call Centre industry. It is the only way I could understand how we get such AWFUL call centre support from the bigger companies.
I have swapped Banks, Credit Cards and ISPs all based on the call centres. It is noticeable how good some centres are. The good ones are quick and easy to deal with. A happy experience. The bad ones leave you in a queue for ages, typing through endless menus, and have accents impossible to understand with totally inflexible scripts.
So the only explanation of the bad ones are the companies don't ever need to deal with their own call centres. And the bosses just get to see positive responses in a faked performance report.
"certain BT staff involved in the activities of Kettering call centre have been released"
I have this image of herds of ape-like call centre workers scampering off into the suburbs of Kettering, screeching to one another as they communiate across streets.
They will be rounded up by the end of the day and retrained to sell timeshares. To each other.
There's nothing new about this. 20-odd years ago BT had targets on services like directory enquiries, where all queued calls must be answered within x minutes. They arranged this by ensuring that when the queues reached x minutes long all new calls got a busy signal. All _accepted_ calls were then answered within the target time.
The assumption was that they were losing about 5% of potential calls that way. One day they decided to measure the actual busied call rate, and were amazed to find that they had miscalculated the expected traffic so badly that 90% of calls were being turned away with a busy signal... Even so, they were still meeting their targets.
A lesson learned by NuLab, of course, who base everything on targets for his very reason. Lies, damned lies, and targets...
I worked for a call centre doing tech support for Iomega (outsourced), and there was one bloke that wouldn't log out from his phone when he left his desk. Funnily enough he was always used as a poster child for having excellent stats. We only realised when I noticed that a call timer counting up, and then the caller hanging up (obviously pissed off). We used to log him off after that.
On topic, how nice it is to see the government actually getting costs back when their contractors fuck up. Obviously the MOD's legal team are better than HMRC's & the Ministries of Health and Education.
by BT. When are people going to stop giving this company their money. I left because of teh Phorm bull. You people have to vote with your feet and your money. What point is it to keep rewarding these multi billion dollar companies with you money when all they do is lie, cheat, steal, stall for time, bully people into staying, pay off officials? STOP giving them money is the wway to get them to behave nicely. Phuck Phorn and Phuck BT.
Targets are created by management who know nothing about the process involved, know nothing about the reality of system, and know nothing about how the real world works. They create these artificial targets and reward people based on these targets. Then they don't provide enough resources for people to achieve these targets no matter what they do.
It's a pity they didn't "release" the idiot senior managers who made the target decisions in the first place. I'm betting they "released" the people on the front lines who got stuck with a "improve your call times or be fired", then weren't given the tools necessary to do that ethically.
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