First, here is a big rant with a question. Afterwards I’ve got a bunch of smaller rants.
I work at REDACTED. (got an NDA) I work from home helping callers file phone insurance claims. During the interview process my position was described more as tech support not claims, also during the interview I was told I would start at $16/hour and also get paid per call (Pay per experience) and in the end whatever number was higher would be my pay. After I got hired I learned that it was filing insurance claims for customers which I was upset about but the job market is super competitive here and I needed something to take care of my family so I stayed.
On the last week of training they had someone come in and explain the pay per experience. Turns out we get paid $16/hour until after 3 months, then we get paid between $2-4 per call with no min per hour. I felt lied to and decided to stay but also to look for another job while working. Hard thing is everything I'm applying for has 300+ applications already submitted on indeed unless I want to take a job paying $13 or less which can't support a family. Also, they advertised that we would be making $20-$30/hour under pay per experience. (Also, wasn't looking super hard because I was expecting 20-30 potentially. In hindsight I shouldn't have trusted that.) Talking to others in my training class, half of us thought we where getting a tech support role and most of us had bad info on pay per experience.
So, sticking it out, I ended up having tons of tech issues, sometimes spent days to a week down due to the hardware they sent me. They actually impressed me by paying me during this time. We where given 3 months of the $16/hour to learn everything and get our numbers up and after that we where going to be sent to the pay per experience. The problem is after 2 months I got most my numbers up, but due to errors in reporting my tech downtime my attendance was marked at 31% absent. (I was paid for this time, just couldn't work due to their hardware not working.) and a few other call stats where marked low. Now these stats are based on things like did you tell a customer to use our website, rated by a program not a person. My coach and I listened to a bunch of calls and found that on 9 out of 10 of the ones marked failed I had done what I was supposed to but the system missed it. He can manually fix them but would need to listen to each call individually to manually fix them and obviously can't listen to a full work day of calls if he has his own responsibilities. (Especially because he is coach over 10 people and I’m not the only one having my numbers reported wrong from the system.) The problem is because those where missed now I'm on PPX and getting paid $2.10 per call instead of the around $4 per call which I would be at if it was recorded correctly. So because of a computer, no fault of my own, my pay is at $13/hour when it should be at $20-26/hour if it had been recorded correctly. So one question, is this legal? Should I file a complaint with the labor department or anyone else? I'm getting paid less not because I'm not working right but because an algorithm is missing things that my coach listens to and hears and my coach doesn't have any pointers on how to fix it because I'm doing what I'm supposed to but the system just doesn't catch it.
Anyways, big rant over, here are some mini rants.
I get customers all the time that have a big issue that is going to take 30+ minutes to resolve and they have been transferred 10+ times because you get paid the same if you transfer the customer right away as you do if you spend 30 minutes with them. So you get paid more for transferring and paid less for doing your job.
During my first 3 months we would have long downtime between calls, sometimes up to 40 minutes. I asked about what would happen when we switched to pay per experience and was told that our downtime would not exist and that calls are prioritized to pay per experience. Now that I'm on Pay per experience I still have the same downtimes, have had multiple 10+ minute downtimes with some going to 30 minutes. I'm stuck at my work pc, not getting paid for 30 minutes waiting for a call that will pay me $2.10 when it finally comes and this sucks.
Apparently when you have tech issues or training there are 3 pieces of paper work you have to fill out if you are on pay per experience. I wasn't told that until the day after we submit our timecards. I ended up having to spend an hour Saturday filling out this extra paperwork so I would get paid.
My coach has been gone since I went onto pay per experience so I've not been able to work on any of these issues with him.
We aren't always allowed to tell customer why they where denied so we just have to give a vague explanation and refer to the terms of service.
Some issues can only be fixed by our escalations team, and we can only escalate if the customer is upset so sometimes if the customer's issue can only be resolved through escalations I will intentionally be dense to piss off the customer so he escalates so he can actually have his issue fixed and not be put on an eternal claim hold. (So yeah, next time the call rep is really stupid and you can’t figure out why, maybe he is trying to help you in a round about way.)
They make us sign an NDA so we won't share anything about our work. They do this because they treat us like crap. There is nothing I know that is ground breaking in this industry.
They also make us sign a paper saying that any intellectual property or inventions we come up with while working for the company are the property of the company and not us. This is crazy because all I'm doing is taking calls, not working on any software or inventions for the company.
They monitor all our communication. The only reason I know others have a similar experience as me is because a few of us created a discord during training. Besides our group in one of our zoom meetings a new hire mentioned that she thought she was getting a tech support role. Not sure what happened with her and wasn’t happy to have been lied to, that was the last time she was in our group meetings.
All of the support departments we need to reach out to for unique situations during calls take a long time to get back to us, sometimes 10+ minutes meaning we spend 10+ minutes waiting for someone and not getting paid for that time.
Anyways, thanks for listening to my rant. Screw life.