I worked for a tech support and CS outsourcing company. I was developing the tools they would use for call logging and associated things.
They were growing rapidly by offering support services to all the new dot com startups. Hours were long, the pay was decent and my head was being fried by having to juggle multiple tech platforms and languages thanks to the differing requirements of the clients.
Then came the bust. Within a matter of months we went from having 2000 support people on site to just 400. To survive the company started targeting non dot com clients. For the most part that meant providing CS support for companies like utilities and retail stores. Standards went downhill and ethics became something other companies thought about. We also lost our on-site subsidised canteen.
One of our post bust clients was Comet, the now defunct UK electrical store. We provided technical support for their extended warranty holders. One of the requirements that they insisted upon was requiring the customer to attempt a full re-install of Windows before agreeing to send out an engineer. I thought this was dodgy AF, especially since the support staff were so untrained. They were making customers reformat their drives because they didn't know how to change the keyboard layout from US to UK. Part of the support staffs training was to be told that the DOG debug tool could fix noisy hard drive and they would ask callers to use it to destroy and recreate the FAT. For an IT support company they knew very little. Their head of training, who had no formal IT training of his own, had some crazy ideas about to fix computers.
One day I got a phone call and the caller introduced herself as "Hi, I'm xxx xxxx and I'm a researcher from BBC Watchdog, just to let you know I'm recording this call and it may be broadcast". While I was trying frantically to flag down a manager, the caller was demanding that I answer questions about an 85 year old WWII veteran who spent 10 years scanning photos of his army friends only to lose all his work because someone told him to reinstall Windows. I didn't usually get phone calls seeing as I was an in-house dev, what happened that day was that the everyone else had been told not to answer the number Watchdog called from (there was previous) and the phone system bounced the call around until muggins here picked it up.
They were growing rapidly by offering support services to all the new dot com startups. Hours were long, the pay was decent and my head was being fried by having to juggle multiple tech platforms and languages thanks to the differing requirements of the clients.
Then came the bust. Within a matter of months we went from having 2000 support people on site to just 400. To survive the company started targeting non dot com clients. For the most part that meant providing CS support for companies like utilities and retail stores. Standards went downhill and ethics became something other companies thought about. We also lost our on-site subsidised canteen.
One of our post bust clients was Comet, the now defunct UK electrical store. We provided technical support for their extended warranty holders. One of the requirements that they insisted upon was requiring the customer to attempt a full re-install of Windows before agreeing to send out an engineer. I thought this was dodgy AF, especially since the support staff were so untrained. They were making customers reformat their drives because they didn't know how to change the keyboard layout from US to UK. Part of the support staffs training was to be told that the DOG debug tool could fix noisy hard drive and they would ask callers to use it to destroy and recreate the FAT. For an IT support company they knew very little. Their head of training, who had no formal IT training of his own, had some crazy ideas about to fix computers.
One day I got a phone call and the caller introduced herself as "Hi, I'm xxx xxxx and I'm a researcher from BBC Watchdog, just to let you know I'm recording this call and it may be broadcast". While I was trying frantically to flag down a manager, the caller was demanding that I answer questions about an 85 year old WWII veteran who spent 10 years scanning photos of his army friends only to lose all his work because someone told him to reinstall Windows. I didn't usually get phone calls seeing as I was an in-house dev, what happened that day was that the everyone else had been told not to answer the number Watchdog called from (there was previous) and the phone system bounced the call around until muggins here picked it up.
I left soon after that.