BPO - Cerebral Insights

Pride and Work

Pride is a dangerous thing.

It is a dangerous companion – a dangerous sin. Pride makes one careless and reckless. Pride blinds one to the realities of things and how things are actually meant to happen. Pride blows up the ego and makes one resent authority or rather invalidate them. Pride is a dangerous thing.

Yet what happens when one is bored out of one’s mind? When one can attest to solving most issues and one can really manage to play with one’s AHT and one’s performance? When one has achieved a sort of peak in one’s current state, one must learn to move on and proceed to the next level with a different high and a different challenge. When there is no challenge in ANY thing at all – no OBs to explain for, no AHT to account for, issue resolutions to bring notice to… what does one do? Where does one go? Nowhere I guess.

This is afterall, employment wherein one’s climb, one’s ascent, is governed by administration, by the circumstances surrounding one’s work. This is employment, wherein one’s success is not solely determined by one’s capabilities but also, largely, by one’s company. This is employment. And this is in the industry I am, unfortunately, part of.

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Note:

I recently discovered that I can actually email the articles I’ve spanned during my free (or avail) time at work without incurring an infraction or grounds for termination. Let’s just say I discovered how to use a certain tool to that advantage. Hehe. So I guess, I’ll be able to post more items here.

AHT and contentment

Looking at my AHT for today’s shift, I am led to wonder about contentment. And as such I again philosophize on something as simple and mundane as an AHT.

When I was a new agent, they said I need not bother with my AHT – even when it was soaring high above the clouds. They said I will eventually learn how to control it. Little by little, I did. Before, when my AHT was between 18 to 19, I was happy. When I was able to get 17, I was happy with 17 and bothered when I reach 18. Then when I happened to reach 14, I was bothered with 15 or 16 or 17. Now I had 10 and 12 or 14 bothered me. Contentment? Satisfaction? When is enough, enough?

Maybe I just lack goals. I admit that I didn’t really push for my AHT to be anything lower than 19. Secretly, I am happy if my AHT rating is at 5. That is enough for me since 5 is the ceiling. Problem is, I do not know if 19 merits a 5 or not. Maybe it does. Maybe I need to ask.

In any case, I find AHT the funniest metrics there is in this industry. Everyone is concerned about it. It is updated by the hour. It is the readily observable metrics and the one that causes most agents to turn irate or impatient. Yet, it constitutes only a small portion of the over-all “grade”. AHT, I believe, is sometimes overly emphasized just because it is the readily observable metrics. It is overly sensationalized. And yet, the customer is not even aware that such a thing as an AHT exists. They are aware that there is a survey and they are aware that customer satisfaction is being measured, but they are by no means aware that the time they spent with an agent is limited.

And so, as the cliché goes: which one is more important – quality or quantity? To the customer’s eyes there is only quality. To the agent’s eyes, quantity often supersedes quality. And we are often left to create a balance which sometimes requires a compromise on some point. Then again, I believe that there will come a time when, after being on the job for a long time, we will learn that delicate balance between quality and quantity.

PostScript: After this article was written, AHT updates are no longer blasted by the hour. And even by the day. Yet I do not claim that this article inspired such. It must have been just a coincedence.

work updates

after doing a moment’s worth of floor walk yesterday, i caught a glimpse of how newbies were managing their calls and thus their AHTs.

i also caught a glimpse of my personna which wishes to share all knowledge and skill known to me to improve their performance.

quite similar to the training session we used to have, and i used to conduct in my previous job.

i guess i’ll make a good team lead. but then again that will take time before that actually happens.

for now, i am content to know that i have managed to learn how to manage my AHT. that the reason for a long call is no longer due to the way i give out instructions or issue resolutions but so much more due to uncontrollable factors like the cust’s technical knowledge or the computer’s actual capacity to perform tasks.

and i guess this is the reason why i’ve plateaued in this work. why, i am suffering from brain damage. hehe. that’s too much.

oh well. gotta manage my breaks as well. so i’m off for now!

Most people hate it when it’s queuing – the rapid succession of calls that leaves one breathless or makes one’s throat ache. But I hate avail time more. When there are almost no calls and the agents are overly staffed, when most of your calls are long calls and you get reprimanded for having a high AHT, when things are so darned boring and you do not know what to do. You’re afraid to shut your eyes for fear you’ll sleep through your job – to be awakened by your boss and to have a worse case of a splitting head ache when you do wake up. I hate queuing but I hate avail time more. Well, in this job, I don’t see much of what I love.

giving up on work hang-ups

There are days when I think I will not last in this job and then there are days when I could see myself moving on to the next step. Lately, I’ve been having misgivings about where I am now – ending up unhappy and disillusioned at this sad but practical turn of events in my life. Yet I must say I’ve managed to cope somehow – buying newspapers and looking for news items or opinions that are worthy to write about.

Lately my blog entries were more of opinions on the issues plaguing our country than the issues plaguing my system. I must have grown tired of analyzing myself too much and ranting about the unusual and unhappy circumstances of my life so I diverted myself to the larger picture or scheme of things. Well, this diversion has somehow made my mind think less of what I have now and somehow it made me a tad happy.

Yet I must say that the repercussions to my body are a bit too much. In order for me to write such articles I had to read up on the news and opinion columns of the national papers and after that I had to formulate my articles. And since these are serious articles, I have to do some editing and some thinking when writing them. And as such the endeavor has left me with little sleep and little rest. To top it, I have to still spend some quality time with my family who are the real reasons why I decided to forego a higher salary in an urban job.

And now I must admit that together with the threat of hypotension, my mind or head feels so heavy and I think I am in for some serious dizzy spells. The queue is quite light – for the moment – and I have a lot of avail time. I could catch some sleep if I want to but I dare not for fear that when I open my eyes, everything would be hazy and I would be unfit to continue with the day’s job.

I must say that the appeal of being a writer – be it freelance or employed – does not ever leave my senses. I could still visualize a life in such a setting. But I must contend myself with what I have now and excel in it. And since I want to combine two things or force to impose my happiness on my practical job, the post of a QA is the most appealing. Because I don’t need to face any other people, that is talk to customers, in order to perform my job. I just need to face the computer and do reports or audit calls. And if I am suffering from hypotension or dizzy spells, due to lack of sleep from doing another job apart from my paid job, then I could still make palusot in the job I have.

Does that make sense or am I simply too stoned now to even make sense of myself? My brother had candidly discovered that if he has poems stored in his notes, I have blog entries. It seems that even when I am just alone with my phone and I have nothing else to do, I have the incessant urge to put my thoughts into writing. And so I revisited the notes section in my phone and was surprised though pleased, to find some blog entries in it. Too bad I haven’t discovered yet mobile posting that time. And too bad I do not take full advantage of it. For if I do, I must have more than a thousand posts in my blog now.

Braindead

Some people ask for promotion to gain more power or more influence. Some ask for promotion to get paid a higher salary. Still some ask for promotion to gain more popularity, credit or prestige. Not me.

I want to be promoted to ask for more workload; more assignments; more responsibility.

Call me work alcoholic, or insane or addicted. Call me whatever you like but deep down, the reason I want promotion so much is not so I could earn more, or be powerful or prestigious in the company but because I am so dead panned bored in what I am doing now.

I can say that I am a very adventurous person – well of course to a certain limit. But I like adventure none the less and I like feeling challenged most of the time. My life as a student was not a tad boring – I went out of my way to try various things to spice up my academic life. I was not content to just study my lessons and pass my exams (or even ace them). For me student life is to be defined by the number of activities you got to try; the number of places you got to visit in the name of academic exposure; the number of people you get to meet in various settings brought about by your extracurricular activities.

No wonder I exposed myself to student bodies and organizing committees; to school papers and school productions. No wonder when I was in college, I applied for 7 organizations in my first semester! Imagine seven! Each organization in UP has a set standard for how you will become a member – tambay hours, service hours, sig sheets, talent nights, costume weeks, etc. And to top all this I still have my acads to attend too. That was how busy I made my life as a student be.

There was never a dull moment as far as I’m concerned because I was always busy with something. My social network expanded like rapid fire due to the various and different natures of the orgs I was part of.

There were times when I became tired of all the hectic-ness (?) I turned my life into. There were times when I wished I could have been just a simple person, with simple wants, and living a very laid back and simple student life. But then right after wishing and dreaming of those things, and perhaps spending a day or two in quiet isolation, I would be back on the hectic midst of it all. I revel in the busyness of my life back then.

Imagine, my chagrin, when after merely 4 months into this job, I was already bored out of my mind. To think I even defended my line of job from my other friends who were also BPO agents, telling them that being a TSR is the most challenging of all accounts in the BPO industry since the TS issues are never same. Well, look at where I am at now. Yes, I am not handling account issues of customers (which I believe I won’t last a month of) but the technical issues they have are also pretty much the same. There are even times when I would already preempt the customer for the exact error or the exact issue since admittedly different individuals have different ways of describing the same issue.

And the very occasional, once-in-a-blue moon, unique issue – a question perhaps on how a less common feature of the product works – is like an oasis in a parched desert – bringing refreshment to my otherwise dead neurons.

I do not mean to brag. One might think I have perfect metrics to be claiming that I am bored with what I am doing – I don’t. My metrics are not perfect. There is still room for improvement, I know. And I still have a lot to learn – there is in fact a promotional post that I deem unworthy to aspire for due to lack of technical knowledge and skill. Yet the fact remains that with where I am at now, I am already bored.

And without my blog and the books I’m reading, or at least trying to, my neurons might be rotting away from lack of exercise; my soul from lack of challenge. And it doesn’t help a bit that I am without any extra-work activities (a parallel of my extracurricular activities) at this point in time. The culprit: my schedule which my body, I believe, is still adjusting to.

This, I guess, is part of the real world I have longed so much for when I was a student. Well, then, I guess all I could say to myself is: Welcome to the REAL world.

work hang-ups: part1

Disgruntled. Dissatisfied. Depressed. Disillusioned.

What do you do when you have a dream – a dream that is eating you up every second of your waking moment? A dream that threatens to engulf your every thoughts and make you dissatisfied with what you have. I am a naturally content person with simple wants and simple dreams. Yet the point is – I have a dream – a dream I long to follow and see if it would suit me. A dream that I know would haunt me for the rest of my life if I don’t do anything about it. A dream that I would always want to pursue, have always wanted to pursue.

I dream of writing to my heart’s content. I dream of reading my name in print – be it as a byline in a newspaper or a magazine I dream of having my own byline I dream of something else – something that is not what I have pursued in my 5 years of college education Something that is not what I am doing now.

Back in university, I live by the maxim: DO NOT LET YOUR EDUCATION INTERFERE WITH YOUR LEARNING. I’ve learned all I can despite that my education was something I really didn’t want. I’ve learned all I can despite that my situation was something really far from my heart. I made do with what I have, confident that I could use my learning, if not my education to pursue my dreams, my ambitions.

Now I have a job, a job brought about by necessity, a job brought about by practicality Now I have a job, a paying job, a job like any other jobs – at least I am not unemployed. For this I know I am thankful. For this I know I am blessed. Yet this is not the job I want nor the job I’ve dreamed of. Should I go on living the university maxim? Should I apply that to this scenario? Would I always go on learning under circumstances I do not wish for nor long for? And would the time ever come when I would be learning under circumstances I’ve dreamt of?

My heart yearns to write, yearns to learn how to write, yearns to improve and develop her own unique style. My heart yearns to make a mark on the publishing world. My sense of challenge yearns to face the challenges of a struggling writer. I yearn for something else.

This dissatisfaction won’t serve me If this continues I will forever be disgruntled,dissatisfied, depressed and disillusioned.

And it wouldn’t be healthy at all.