TL;DR: In the title
Been lurking for a bit and now want to share something with you all.
For context, I work remote in outbound sales B2C. It’s a call center job, so I basically spend my day conducting cold call leads (some warm, some cold), emailing some people, and helping them plan their vacations. The metrics we are evaluated on are 120 dials per day, 2 reservations with a deposit, or 4 hours of talk time every day day. As long as we hit 1/3 we’re doing our job.
Lately sales have been slow for me. I’ve been working my ass off, hitting my dials count or talk time, spending time expanding my product knowledge, and for the most part doing my job while not doing anything to get me fired. However as a result of my low reservation count, my “coach” got concerned & decided to finally start listening in on my calls to understand what was happening; they wanted to know why a hard worker such as myself wasn’t making bookings, so we start conducting 1:1 meetings. You should know this coach is the type of person that likes to preach and listen to themselves talk, but doesn’t actually listen all that well when we provide feedback to them; they also have been saying our dials are the most important metric to them, but then on another day decide that’s not enough. It’s at a point where my team’s morale is on the floor, and several agents are ready to call it quits or transfer out of the department because of how poorly management is behaving towards them.
Over the course of several 1:1 meetings, I tried being as coachable as possible while also providing feedback about the quality of our leads, and expressing to the coach that I’m also starting to feel emotionally tired and burnt out due to my frustration with not making bookings and how suddenly dials aren’t as important to them. All I get from them ultimately is that I need to work harder, dial more, and focus more on building relationships with my leads so that in the long run they work with me.
Fast forward to last week, we’re on our 1:1 meeting towards the end of the day, and this meeting ends up taking 3 hours; I’m exhausted, hungry as I worked through my lunch, and am definitely feeling burnt out (all of which I tell him at the end, btw), but still arguing with the coach over some calls he thought were less than stellar. As we’re approaching the end of the work day, I realize that I have some leads I won’t get a chance to call, so I mark them in the CRM as if I had so I can make sure to schedule a call with them first thing in the morning. In my mind I’m thinking ‘no big deal, I can still call them tomorrow when I’m well rested’ but I was wrong. Coach sees this, immediately tells me this is a terminable offense, and tells me to log off. He obviously reports this to upper management and HR, gets told that ‘everyone has shit going on but this is unacceptable’ so I get the written warning.
Now, due to the written warning I would have to wait a year before it disappears from my record, I wouldn’t be able to transfer to another department until that year passes, I would need to consistently meet with this coach to let him everything that’s happening in my life so he can help me improve & get through this, and if I make a mistake I get fired. I have no intention of living my next year under the threat of being fired, so I’m already looking for a new job. But I’m not sure what to do about the written warning as they expect me to sign it, and I don’t know what happens if I refuse.
Sorry for the long story, but I’d appreciate any feedback. I’m so tired I just want to drop dead on my bed & never get up.