Guard dogs

Back home. Tired. They made us listen in to calls for half a day and then made us take live calls. Which seems pretty stupid, considering we go back into classroom training in a week. What's the point of making half-way trained people deal with your customers? But that's another story.

To-day I saw a guard dog in action.
The asst mgr, a woman, stalked up and down the aisles looking at the call centre staff's screens. Reminds me of the last time i worked in a formal call centre.

I last worked call centres in 2000 when I was a team leader myself. I was brought in to kick-start the customer service arm in a local call centre and as the team grew, they started looking for new staff to understudy me.

They brought in this woman from a local govt body. She was a guard dog too. Her style was diametrically opposite to mine. She was all rigid rules, the enforcer type, all black & white and no common sense. I remember she understudied me for about a week, then I was off on my leave-break.

Ho ho.
When I came back 2 weeks later, I found that she'd quit. And my teams had made her quit. Heh! They had bloody rebelled!

Their work quality didn't suffer - in fact it went up because they'd wanted to show her up. But they otherwise ignored her, gave her lip, did their own thing, consulted the OTHER team leaders, and generally made her life a miserable hell as only 20-30 bitching, sullen, resentful 19 year olds can.

Guard dogs are crap. They don't nurture, they press you down in your cubby hole and peg you up. They prevent you from flying. From being creative and inspired. From finding out how? when? can I? make life better for my customer. They usually turn a can do! into a fuck it! as well.


Of course, I couldn't tell'em, but I suspect they knew I was proud of them.