My thoughts for today

It looks as though I finally have a routine that will let me post here much more regularly. I will try to update once a day at least. I may miss a few here and there but I will do my utmost to keep up to date.

I have been thinking very strongly about perhaps starting a consulting business. Anyone that has ever had to make a call to a large corporation for help will have run into those representatives who seem to have but one goal in life and that is to get you off the phones as quickly as possible whether the problem is fixed or not.

Please remember when calling in that the attitude that you notice is really driven by the company and not the rep in most cases. Corporations set goals for call times that can vary by business type but I have seen companies where you were expected to handle as many as 20 or more calls an hour and other companies that are a bit more realistic but I have never seen a company dealing with the consumer directly that allows you to be on a call for more than about 15 minutes before management will be hounding you to get off the call.

Most of this is driven by the companies going out of their way to pay as little as possible and still get living and breathing bodies on the phone. Remember also that in this field over the last few years the starting salaries have gone down all over and down dramatically in some cases.

My goal is to try and show companies that the better you treat both your employees and you customer the better off the company will be and the more profitable it will be in the future. The problem is that no one is willing to look at anything beyond the current quarter and have lost site of any long term goals.

Henry Ford had the right idea when he started his company. His idea was that you make the best possible product, for the lowest possible cost while paying the highest possible wages. We have now perverted that to selling the lowest quality that anyone is willing to buy while charges as much as we can get anyone to pay for it while paying the lowest possible wages.

I have absolutely no problem with making a profit. That is why people go into business. However, when you see any company where the CEO makes more than 1000 times what his lowest paid employee makes then that is a company that has no regards whatsoever for either the employees or for the customer.

 

Stay away from these companies when you can!!!

Job woes

If anyone wonders why the average income for people has dropped in this country over the last ten years I can tell you it is because of the way most large corporations handle things. The last job I had was in a call center for a major telephone company in the United States.

I started a phone representative taking calls from customers with technical problems handling them one at a time. I then moved on to handling 10 customers at a time through a chat program that they had. From there I became a Quality Assurance representative making sure that the contacts were handled appropriately and in a timely fashion. From there I became a coach responsible for working with the representatives to make sure that things were done correctly and working one on one with the representatives to get them any additional training they needed as well as putting together improvement goals for them. While I did get a yearly raise (not very large most of the time) all of those jobs were considered lateral moves which means that even though each position had substantially increased responsibilities, those responsibilities were apparently not important enough to warrant an actual promotion which of course would have resulted in additional pay.

Due to the company being purchased I am now working for 35% less than I was before at another company. Hopefully this company handles things a bit differently but we shall see.

Is Spring Here?

It has been gorgeous here for the last day or so after all that rain. Perhaps spring is finally here. Not a real bad winter as far as temperatures go but the snow was pretty brutal. 2 storms about 5 days apart dropped around 50 inches of snow between them.

Just outside for a bit and actually pretty nice at 1:15 in the morning. Around 45 degrees and almost no wind at all. A very nice night.

I put the house up for sale this past weekend because with the new job I can no longer afford it. Hopefully we find a buyer before the bank forecloses on it.

Weather Blues

So we have the second day of rain. It is very blustery and cold along with pretty steady rain that makes for a pretty miserable time. I will say that I am grateful for the fact that the temperatures have come up. If it was still as cold as it was a few weeks ago this would be something like 30 or 40 inches of snow and I have had quite enough snow for a while.

I also got to put my house up for sale because I can no longer afford to live here with the pay cut I needed to take to get out of a job position that I am certain is going to be eliminated at some point based on the behavior of some of the supervisory and management staff.