Every agent PC records its screen while an agent is logged in, so quality can see what was done as well as what was said. PC 217 records with nobody logged in. The screen is locked. The recording shows the lock screen, and then, over it, a case note being typed into a system that is not open, one letter at a time, with corrections, into the record of one customer, and the note says sorry, and the note is saved, and it is in the customer's file in the morning.
I am the systems administrator at a call centre and PC 217 is the machine I have reimaged four times.
The recording.
Every agent PC captures its screen when an agent is logged in. Quality watches the capture beside the call so they can see what the agent did, and the captures are kept for ninety days.
PC 217 captures with nobody logged in. The screen is locked. The capture shows the lock screen, the company logo, the clock. And then, at about half past one, over the lock screen, a window. The case system. A customer record, open. And the cursor in the notes field, and typing.
The typing.
Slow. Two fingers. A letter, a pause, a letter. A wrong one, backspace, the right one. It is a person who is not good at this, doing it carefully, and it takes about twenty minutes to type what an agent would type in two.
What is typed is a note on the customer's record. It says, in words that change a little each night, that the agent is sorry. That they should have done something they did not. That they had told the customer it was sorted and it was not, and the customer had rung back and got somebody else and been told there was no note, because there was no note, because the agent had not written one, and that they were writing one now. And then it is saved, and the window closes, and the lock screen is the lock screen.
The note is on the customer's record in the morning. Timestamped half past one. Agent id, a number that is not in the system, in a format the system stopped using.
The customer.
One customer. Every night. A man, elderly, in a town up north, whose record has a note on it every night going back three years, three years of apologies, each a little different, each typed by two fingers, and above the apologies, from before they started, a single note from a day in 2011, from the same agent id, that says, cust adv resolved, and it was not.
He rang back, the record shows. Four times. Each time told there was no note of the promise. Each time given the runaround. And then he stopped ringing, and the record has a marker on it now, added by the data people, which is the marker they add when the credit agencies say a person has died.
What has been checked.
The PC, reimaged. The capture continues. The PC, replaced with a different one at the same desk. The different one captures the typing.
The desk, at half past one, by me, beside it. The lock screen. And then the window, and the cursor, and the keys. I watched the keys. They went down. Two fingers' worth, one at a time, the key going down and up, the letter appearing, the backspace, and there were no fingers, and I sat beside a person who was not there, typing an apology to a man who was not there either, for twenty minutes, and at the end the enter key went down and the note saved, and the window closed, and I said, into the empty seat, it's saved, and something at the desk breathed out.
Who.
The agent id. The old format. HR's backup had it. An agent, young, on the floor for a year in 2011, who had left, and whose leaving date was the week after the man's fourth call back, and whose reason for leaving was blank, and the old hands did not remember him, and I have not been able to find out what happened to him, and the note is still being typed, so I have my guess.
What is done about it.
The notes are on a dead customer's record and the data people have flagged the record as having activity after date of death, which is a fraud marker, and have asked me to investigate, and I have said, it is an agent correcting a note, which is what it is.
What I do.
I administer the systems.
There is a thing an agent can do on a record, which is to close a case, and it needs a reason, and one of the reasons in the list is, resolved to customer's satisfaction, and it cannot be chosen by anybody but a team leader, because it is the one that ends things.
I have given his agent id team leader rights. It took some doing. The id does not exist and I had to make it, in the old format, and the system fought me, and I won.
He has not closed the case. He types the apology, every night, two fingers, and saves it, and the case stays open, and I have understood that he does not know he can close it, because nobody ever told him he had the right, and I am going to have to find a way to tell an agent who has been gone since 2011 that it is all right now, that the customer is beyond the runaround, that the note is written, that he can pick the last reason in the list and go, and I have started leaving the window open on 217 at close, with the reasons list dropped down, and the last one highlighted, and I do not know if he can see it, but the apology last night was shorter.