So I work for a certain Big Red phone company as a Customer Service rep and have for the past 6-7 years. We have dealt with all kinds of nonsense over the years but the new new is a Key Performance Index called “NVPC,” or Net Value per Customer. This basically means they take into account how many lines we disconnect, how much insurance we sell or remove, how many extra products or subscriptions or higher plans we can get people to switch to, etc. Anything that makes the customer's monthly recurring charges higher, is a positive, anything that lowers their bill is a negative.
Now, we've always had a problem with dishonest sales reps in stores, it is what it is. Since this change has been made however, the floodgates have opened. The amount of charges and extra features I have removed from irate customer's accounts who were straight up lied to in store or on their last call has sky rocketed. Entire plan changes made without permission, Cloud added with no permission. Home Protect? Oh, you don't know what that is? It's $25/month. Deal with it.
The kicker here, those who are familiar with call center culture will probably recognize. From my experience at least, these centers tend to focus on a few main goals or KPI's at a time
. For the entire 6-7 years I have been here, one of those main goals that was always looked at was some variation of “Customer Experience,” or more bluntly, after call surveys. Well…guess what they stopped prioritizing recently.
So, a few months later, here I am. On the bottom of the stack list for NVPC. They are walking through the motions to fire me that I've watched them walk through with so many reps before me. I am being fired based on the fact that I have not increased enough customer's bills, while these customers are calling me to remove the services that have been fraudulently added by previous reps.
I can probably get in some serious trouble for saying some of this but honestly I hope this post reaches more people. This is the reason your phone bill is increasing. It wasn't an accident, the rep knew, and the rep is being encouraged to do so by these shitty anti-consumer business practices.