So, I am a part of a 2-person team who deals with reception duties, it consists of what you would expect really; calls, emails, letters, ect.
It's usually a pretty simple job with little going wrong. Well until today.
We operate a switchboard phone line, where the majority of calls for this sector the company come through. We figure out the best place to send the caller, to deal with whatever they've explained to us, then put them through.
Today, out of no where, caller after caller would call back saying how they've been on hold for an excessive amount of time, from 10-30 minutes, usually the wait time is only a couple seconds as there should be a lot of people on each line we can send a call to.
So, we have a look, and it turns out literally everyone who should be on these lines, are instead in a large meeting. Which we were not informed of.
Now if we had been told, this would be okay as we can just inform the callers there is a company wide meeting occurring, take their details and ask the team to call them back when they can. (This kind of thing has happened before). However, we did not know a meeting was due to happen, no one told us anything, so we had been sending people to wait for zero reason, and as it happens, people start to get pretty pissed off.
One lady called back and my god I've never dealt with someone so aggressively annoyed, she wasn't directing it at me, but she was ranting and ranting, absolute pain to deal with. At this point we knew a meeting was happening, so I ask to take her details. At this point she demands it go through complaints, which after several attempts of reassuring her I will send them her details, she calms down and ends the call.
So, following the enjoyable experience of being the receiving end of someones absolute near-rage about something that isn't my fault, I decide to message my manager.
Summary of what I said:
– I don't understand why there isn't at least one person for each line on call during these meetings, one of the receptionists need to be on call for all the working hours, so why does this meeting result in everyone else coming off, making the phoneline useless for an hour?
– Could the meeting not be recorded/summarised in writing for those who miss it, if it is important.
– Most importantly, why were we not told this was going to happen? We would've prepared everything for than hour and dealt with it accordingly. Because we were not told, there is a potential that someone could be waiting for up to an hour for someone to pick up their call.
An hour after sending that message, we are called for a quick team meeting, I already knew this was going to be bad.
Can you guess what the core focus of this meeting was?
“It seems as if you were questioning management? I have had to raise this to the higher ups and I sent them your message.”
That's it. She said it was human error that we were not informed about everyone else coming off their respective phone lines, then nitpicked at me questioning why this happened as well as trying to point out potential solutions. She also pointed out my co-worker took far less calls than I did yesterday, despite knowing for parking reasons my co-worker comes in very early to the office on her days in, and is finished with work in the early afternoon.
She said it is unacceptable that people could be on hold for over an hour, and that we need to prevent that. (Which would've been the bloody case if you told us no one was going to be on the lines for the duration of that meeting)
Needless to say, this responce just about boiled my piss.
So, my question is to all of you, what is your opinion on this?
I wouldn't be suprised if I got some kinda sanction/warning about this, I will update if anything does happen.
TLDR; I ask why things went wrong, manager asks why I'm questioning management.