After a call the customer can stay on and rate the agent, one to ten, and leave a comment, and the score goes to the agent's file and the bonus. Every night one survey comes in that is not attached to a call. Ten out of ten. For an agent who left in 2015. With a comment, in the voice recording, from a woman who says the agent was kind to her, and the comments have gone from one sentence to a story, and the story is about the agent.
I am the quality manager at a call centre and the surveys are the numbers that decide who gets what, and one of them is deciding something else.
The survey.
At the end of a call the customer is asked to hold for a short survey, and most hang up, and the ones who stay give a score and, if they want, a comment, which is recorded. The score goes to the agent's file. The bonus is on it.
Every night a survey comes in with no call.
The score.
Ten. The agent id is a woman who left in 2015. Her file is closed. The system should not accept a survey for a closed file and it accepts this one, every night, at about ten past eleven, from a caller whose number is the number of a landline in a house in the town.
The comment. A woman, old, in the recording, saying that the young lady was very kind and very patient and that she felt much better for the call. That was the comment for the first year, or a version of it.
It got longer. The recordings are kept and I have listened to them in order. The comment became a description: what the agent had said, how she had waited while the caller found her glasses, how she had not sighed, how she had said, take your time, we've got all night. And then it became a story, over months, the story of a call, one call, told a little more each night, and I know the call now, the way you know a story you have been told many times, and it was a call about a bill, and it was not about a bill, and the agent had understood that, and had stayed on the line for fifty minutes with a woman who was on her own in a house and had not spoken to anybody for a week.
What has been checked.
The survey system, by the vendor, who found the surveys and could not find the calls and could not find how a survey is being submitted for a closed agent and could not stop it.
The number. I rang it. It rang out. I drove past the house. It is a house, with a sign in the window from an estate agent, and it has been for sale for a long time, and the neighbour told me that the lady had died a few years ago and there had been no family.
She is still ringing in with her ten. Every night. For a call in 2015 that lasted fifty minutes.
The agent.
I found her. She is not hard to find. She left in 2015 to do something else, and I rang her, and I told her, carefully, and she was quiet for a long time, and then she said that she remembered the call. That it was the last call of her last shift. That she had stayed on because she could not think of a reason not to, and that she had been marked down for it, for the handle time, and that it had been the thing that made her decide to leave, that the fifty minutes that had felt like the only real thing she had done in three years had cost her a bonus.
She asked me what the score was. I said ten. Every night. She asked me what the comment said and I played her the latest one, which is nine minutes long now, and she cried, and I let her.
What is done about it.
The survey is on the report every night as an orphaned response and the bonus system has been trying to pay her a bonus for eleven years and the closed file will not take it, and the finance office has the accrued amount on a list of unpayable items, and it is not nothing.
What I do.
I manage quality.
I reopened the file. Not for work. The system allows a file to be reopened for a correction, and I have made one. The handle time on the last call of her last shift, which was marked as a fail, is marked now as an exception, with a reason code, and the reason code is one I had to create, and it says, call length justified by customer need, and I have put my name on it.
The survey comes in every night. Ten. The comment is a story now and it is, I think, nearly finished, because the last few nights the old woman has been telling the part at the end of the call, where the young lady said goodnight and the old woman said, you've been so kind, and the young lady said, that's all right, that's what we're here for.
And I have sent the recordings to her. All of them. In order. And she wrote back and said that it was the only performance review she had ever had that was true, and I have put that in the file too.