I am an employee of Orange (as so many before me) and I do feel that we have failed to make our position as front-line CSAs clear. I will try to post the answers to all of your questions as clearly as possible (and as I have a degree in English (useless hence working in this industry) I should be able to help)
There are a few major issues that have been mentioned so far. I am not going to attempt to resolve any of your actual broadband issues in this thread, simply because this is not my reason for posting.
Before I continue, a little background... I'm currently on the Firmware Escalations Team, which was basically started when Orange (Wanadoo) found that the Livebox just gave in when unplugged during a firmware update. Not you guys' fault really- we probably should have told you, but tbh at the contact centre I work we have no (NOT ONE JOT) of access to up-to-date information, no access to the servers (can't help with those email issues apart from making you a new profile) and no (NO) line of direct contact to anyone above call cantre manager status. Call centre managers work for the outsourced company, not for Orange. My team leader, although absolutely sterling in every way can't help you any more than I can either. Anyway, that was a bit of an aside.
One of the things mentioned in a previous thread was "why can't we be put straight through to the second line teams who can get the problems resolved immediately?"
That's what I want to address in this thread.
Basically, each of the second line teams has about 15-30 agents per call centre each. That's compared to at least 150 agents per callcentre on a daily basis. That basically means that to put you straight through we'd have to find another 100+ specially trained and highly experienced agents per callcentre, per team.
Out of the 150+ first line agents, there's maybe 15 at most who really don't care about you 100% of the time. Trust me, we do get rid of them.
Unfortunately the last 7 months or so we have been drastically understaffed. This means that we haven't been able to sack the bad agents.
The other problem this creates is that the call queues are stupendous. This means that agents who are normally patient, helpful and knowledgeable become pressured and, well, ratty. It never used to be that way, when I first started on tech there was about 25+ mins of availability between calls. Various equipment issues, the fact we haven't been taking on new staff and the massive growth of our customer base since Orange took over means that things have been getting progressively worse.
However! Things have taken a bit of an upward turn of late. We've been taking on lots of new staff with improved training procedures.
Another aspect of this problem, the fact that you guys (understandably) don't like speaking to inexperienced staff... Well, I've been here a while and I know my tech very, very well. There are quite a few of us, but we've all been promoted off the front line because frankly we wouldn't have hung around if we weren't. Firstly Orange need the knowledgeable staff to run academys for new agents, join higher teams such as escalations, faults and FET, and various other things, as well as possible promotions within our own outsourced companies.
All in all, I was once a newbie myself, and in all of the newbies we've recently taken on I've seen the same qualities I displayed myself when I first started working in tech support a long long time ago. They ask questions when they have problems or can't find the answer on knowledge base, and they usually get the problem resolved (within their remit anyway).
Things are going to get better, and hopefully your customer experience will dramatically improve. It will if I've got anything to do with it anyway.
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