TLDR: my department has been handed the responsibilities of another team pertaining to products and systems we’ve never been required to know anything about before. How can I pursue getting paid for this added labor in a disgusting corporate environment ridden with sell-outs?
Looking for some advice here.
I work for a painfully corporate call center. Currently in a very specialized department. We’re trained to be highly informed and have one foot in every other department just due to the extent of our responsibilities, but it is still customer service at the end of the day.
I’m currently paid $21/hr which is kind of bullshit.
Recently though, we’ve been thrown an entire department. This department worked with one of the few product types we never interacted with, and 90% of us have ZERO experience with that product type whatsoever as all other departments do not deal with it (it used to be managed by a third party). We got all of 1.5 hours of training on how to do one specific type of call, and were told very specifically that is all we would be doing, and then we were thrown to the wolves.
It’s been a mess.
We are not equipped or educated to be handling this product type, and the training we did get is BARELY enough to cover that one type of call. Everyone’s confused, customers are being passed back and forth getting nowhere, and it’s just a fucking disaster. We’ll be transferred a customer, do our process, and then the customer has questions we can’t answer so we have to patch them back over. Our queue times went from 1-2 mins between calls to 40+ mins of hold. I’m keeping it vague but due to regulatory requirements there could be legal or even job-ending consequences for misinforming a customer.
Normally I’d pull my weight to figure it out and find reliable resources and educate myself, but frankly I’m just not getting paid to do that. Throughout all of this there has been NO discussion of a pay increase. I’ve brought it up every single meeting and all my managers can say is that they’ll bring it up to their managers (Again, super corporate). It’s been getting me nowhere.
I’m posting here hoping someone may have some recommendations on how to best mitigate this request in such a violently corporate environment. My knee jerk is to call HR but that feels incorrect (tho honestly HR handles a bunch of stuff so it isn’t as extreme as it sounds). My next thought is to coordinate with my teammates but frankly a lot of them enjoy the flavor of boot. I’d quit, or threaten to, but the health insurance is juicy and delicious and I have too many health concerns to lose it.
My logic is that I get paid $21/hr to perform the role I was performing before this acquisition(we’re going to pretend inflation doesn’t exist atm). If I weren’t afraid of being fired I’d flat out refuse to take calls pertaining to this other product, and convince as many people as I could to do the same. My manager has been useless, his manager has been useless, and I’m starting to feel like I’m the one being unreasonable. Any advice on how to get paid for my labor?