A call centre’s ‘one strike’ policy has backfired.
The bosses at the Melbourne-based OmniServe call centre implemented the controversial policy late last year.
Under the policy, new starters would spend the first week training and ‘buddying’ with experienced call centre agents. But after that, the new starters could only afford to make one mistake (as judged by the quality control team) and were fired on the spot. Once new starters passed the first month, the ‘one strike’ policy ended.
A senior worker, who wanted to stay anonymous, said the policy was brought in, “because new starters were getting sloppy and not taking the job seriously enough. Lots of people see this as a gateway job to pay the bills while they study or do other things. But the bosses didn’t like that – they wanted to put the fear of God into the ‘lazy’ workers.”
Though the policy had an immediate backlash: those who weren’t fired quit inside the first month due to the pressure to perform and the consequences of failure.
“One poor guy had a mild stutter, but the closer he got to making a mistake, the worse his stutter got and he could barely get a sentence out by the end. He didn’t even last a week.”
The policy was affecting the customer service quality, with a lot of customers complaining that new agents were too tentative as they were scared to make a mistake. This meant calls that should of taken minutes to resolve took a lot longer. The policy was officially put ‘under review’ in late January.
“They should scrap the stupid policy, but that probably won’t happen; the bosses enjoy the power trip too much, even though OmniServe’s name is mud now and new hires have been slow since January,” said the senior worker. “I was even looking at new jobs over the Christmas break, just in case things get worse here.”
