I work in technical support for a mid-sized tech company. We mostly handle programming and customer retention issues with the software, reporting them to programmers, our QA team, and sales to help things run smoothly. We have two managers on our team, one overseeing support as a whole and another focused mainly on programming issues.
Yesterday, we were all invited to a meeting to discuss “changes” to our workflow. In the meeting, we were told that we were not allowed to speak to our programmers, our quality assurance, or our sales team directly anymore. Everyone not on support has been removed from our Teams account, moved to Slack, and is no longer accessible by us. They’ve also been moved to a different ticketing system, so we have NO way of contacting them. Every time you need to talk to someone who is in any other department, you need to message one of the 2 managers and have them forward the message for you. Our support team is scheduled until 8pm, and these managers leave at 5pm. Meaning, if an issue arises that needs immediate attention, you can only take a message and get back to them whenever a manager decides to get back to you. The managers are not very responsive and I’ve waited multiple days before hearing back from them before, and it’s gotten noticeably worse since this change since the entire support team needs approval for essentially every ticket that comes in.
The change is obviously not being taken well by anyone on support. I sit in the cubicle next to a person who is hybrid programming-support, and he’s refused to say a single word to me today. We’re all afraid of repercussions if we say anything to someone outside of our department. I’ve already gotten hard “no”s from managers, flat out REFUSING to escalate tickets that need to be looked at by programming, because “The programmers don’t need to be bothered with this. You need to be doing your due diligence and resolving this on your own. They have more important tickets to work on”.
I’ve only been at this position for a few months, and several of us are very new. We were promised help from several experienced people with any questions we might have until we’re comfortable with the software, but now we’ve been told that we should be handling every question we have ourselves, or waiting for a manager to answer questions. I feel completely disrespected and angry, but I can’t afford to leave. My job is fairly specialized and very few positions are hiring in my area for a similar path, much less paying as much as this place.