What's a NOC motto?
I've always concerned myself with the customer's needs over my own, and it usually works in my favor.
When I work as a captain, for instance, the customers tend to love me, because I treat every customer as if they are big tippers, unlike my coworkers, who only treat the big tippers like big tippers, and treat everyone else like second class citizens.
There's 2 reasons I treat everyone equally... The first reason is because I don't keep track of who tipped and who didn't, and therefor don't remember. The second reason is, just because they didn't tip last time doesn't mean they won't tip next time... Maybe they didn't have any cash on them, or something.
When I was working as tech support, I had the same mentality, but it bit me in the ass, because I treated every customer equally, but it turns out that some of the customers were share holders, and didn't appreciate waiting in a queue. This is one of the many reasons I think I was laid off... I have to imagine the reasons, because the reason they told me was clearly bullshit.
They told me they were moving the call center to another state, but roughly half of the employees were from out of state, anyway, and worked from home. Even I worked from home, on snow days, or when the office had a gas leak. So clearly moving the call center should not effect me.
the king
Re: the king
NOC
N = Network
O = Operations
C = Center
Now, as for people who are actual Stock Holders in a company that are also purchasing services when you worked as Tech Support.....not sure who your company was, but they messed up big time. For those people, they should have multiple separate call in numbers they can use, and should have a dedicated call in group to work all their issues. If the dedicated call in group is too busy to answer a call due to already working an issue, then the call should roll over to the main group for support as a priority 1 inbound call. All other non-stockholder calls then get bumped to deal with the main stockholder call in's. When their are no other inbound calls, then the main group goes back to dealing with non-stockholder calls.
N = Network
O = Operations
C = Center
Good reasoning, and well thought out. It could be they may be having a bad day also. If you're having a bad day and have to work with customers, put on an act just to the time you have to deal with the customer, or you can lose a customer, and if they suspect anything about your attitude and report it, you could get a write up from someone above which goes into your permanent record for future reviews which will effect any raises, promotions, etc.There's 2 reasons I treat everyone equally... The first reason is because I don't keep track of who tipped and who didn't, and therefor don't remember. The second reason is, just because they didn't tip last time doesn't mean they won't tip next time... Maybe they didn't have any cash on them, or something
Now, as for people who are actual Stock Holders in a company that are also purchasing services when you worked as Tech Support.....not sure who your company was, but they messed up big time. For those people, they should have multiple separate call in numbers they can use, and should have a dedicated call in group to work all their issues. If the dedicated call in group is too busy to answer a call due to already working an issue, then the call should roll over to the main group for support as a priority 1 inbound call. All other non-stockholder calls then get bumped to deal with the main stockholder call in's. When their are no other inbound calls, then the main group goes back to dealing with non-stockholder calls.
Re: the king
Our phone systems weren't that sophisticated.
When each employee's phone is added to the queue, it is assigned priority based on it's position in the list. My phone was first on the list, so it always rang first. Even if I were on the phone, or I disconnected my phone, it was still on the list, and the customer would have to wait for 3 rings before it would automatically transfer to the next phone number on the list. I'm not 100% sure how many phones were on the list, but do know that when I was in the office, mine rang before anyone else's, 100% of the time. My missed call counter would increment while I was talking on the phone, or while I was in the bathroom. When I set my phone to away status, all it does it mute the ringer... There were still calls coming in, but the ringer wouldn't annoy everyone else. I once intentionally missed a call, when I knew no one else was working (5 AM), to see how long it would take for the queue to come back to me. It took so long, I thought maybe someone actually was working remotely, and forgot about it. Then my phone rings, I answer it, and the customer complains to me, they've been listening to the ringer for half an hour.
Our phone systems were terrible. They kept promising they'd upgrade us to soft phones, but I never saw that day.
When each employee's phone is added to the queue, it is assigned priority based on it's position in the list. My phone was first on the list, so it always rang first. Even if I were on the phone, or I disconnected my phone, it was still on the list, and the customer would have to wait for 3 rings before it would automatically transfer to the next phone number on the list. I'm not 100% sure how many phones were on the list, but do know that when I was in the office, mine rang before anyone else's, 100% of the time. My missed call counter would increment while I was talking on the phone, or while I was in the bathroom. When I set my phone to away status, all it does it mute the ringer... There were still calls coming in, but the ringer wouldn't annoy everyone else. I once intentionally missed a call, when I knew no one else was working (5 AM), to see how long it would take for the queue to come back to me. It took so long, I thought maybe someone actually was working remotely, and forgot about it. Then my phone rings, I answer it, and the customer complains to me, they've been listening to the ringer for half an hour.
Our phone systems were terrible. They kept promising they'd upgrade us to soft phones, but I never saw that day.
Re: the king
Damn, that is a terrible phone system. Ours rings 5 times then goes to the next person. We also had a hotline setup for what we called premier customers. Customers who would pay a bit more for their services. Those are the one's that get priority. If your on the phone, it would auto go to the next person in queue. Just in my NOC I have 30 Associates, but my NOC isn't the only one, we have 20 NOC's around the World and all work with each other. So if the phone rings and the call is missed, it could ring back within my NOC, or go to another NOC somewhere else. That way the call does get answered by someone, somehow and the issue(s) get's worked. That's just for the Transport lines. The main lines T1's and T3's which are your copper cable lines, and OC3's, OC12's, OC48's, and OC192's are your optical rings. The US has an OC192 on each corner which carries everybody. There is a working and protected side. If one side goes down hard, the protected side kicks in keeping all the customers up and working. A signal is sent to the main office in which a field tech then tracks down the port and head to head testing begins to find the issue. Once the issue is found, it is repaired and retest to confirm it's active status. The customer's are then notified that their will be a maintenance scheduled to switch them back to the working path.
Now as for anything that rides a transport line, like voice, or fax, it goes to another group called the Data Group. They troubleshoot the issue(s), but if they are finding more than one customer down hard or having issues while working theirs, they find out what Transport line is carrying those customers and opens a ticket with the transport group to put a monitor on the main line to find out if it is or isn't having an issue. If it is having an issue, then it get's remote testing done to track down the area of where the problem is and then a field tech get's dispatched to the area to fix the issue, or if it's in one of our data centers, the equipment get's looked into for the repair.
Most of what we see that is damaging the transport lines that carry everything is people who dig. They do not survey their property before digging to get all the buried lines marked out, and when they dig, they cut multiple companies lines. Then you have multiple housing communities down hard with their services. Even contracted construction companies do the same thing. After the repairs are completed and the people's and businesses services are restored, a bill get's sent to the main company or individual person(s) who was doing the digging. They have to settle the time, people, and equipment that was put into making the repair. These bills can run into the tens of thousands depending on what was cut.
Now as for anything that rides a transport line, like voice, or fax, it goes to another group called the Data Group. They troubleshoot the issue(s), but if they are finding more than one customer down hard or having issues while working theirs, they find out what Transport line is carrying those customers and opens a ticket with the transport group to put a monitor on the main line to find out if it is or isn't having an issue. If it is having an issue, then it get's remote testing done to track down the area of where the problem is and then a field tech get's dispatched to the area to fix the issue, or if it's in one of our data centers, the equipment get's looked into for the repair.
Most of what we see that is damaging the transport lines that carry everything is people who dig. They do not survey their property before digging to get all the buried lines marked out, and when they dig, they cut multiple companies lines. Then you have multiple housing communities down hard with their services. Even contracted construction companies do the same thing. After the repairs are completed and the people's and businesses services are restored, a bill get's sent to the main company or individual person(s) who was doing the digging. They have to settle the time, people, and equipment that was put into making the repair. These bills can run into the tens of thousands depending on what was cut.
Re: the king
The company I worked for provided a mass messaging platform for schools (school cancellation, automated attendance, etc...), medical offices (appointment reminders), and a few shareholders (fax spammers).
We could simultaneously robo-dial 17,000 phone lines for our customers.
I was initially hired for Tier 2 tech support (resolve support tickets by fixing configuration issues or escalating potential software bugs to the platform team), but after 4 days was "promoted" to Tier 1 customer service (answer phone calls) when the company decided to break it's outsourced contract with a call center in the Philippines. Customers hated talking to Philippians because they couldn't understand each other, and the Philippians weren't trained on our software, so all they did was take messages for Tier 2.
I didn't get much training for Tier 2, because we were understaffed, Tier 1 was useless, and therefor my trainer was too busy working to train me. But they had a different person train me (and 4 others) for Tier 1, and she demanded to be taken off the phone queue so she could dedicate her time to training. After a month of training us, they put us on the phones, and 1 week later, another group was added to the phones (yes, some of us got 1 month of training, others got 1 week...)
When the noobies got added to the phone queue, they changed my schedule from 9-5, to 3-1... That's 3 AM until 1 PM... Yes, 3:00 fucking O'clock, AM. 99.9% of our tech support calls happen at between 4-6 AM (last minute school cancellation time), yet there were only 2 people scheduled to answer the phones during those hours... Myself, and a guy I never physically met (because he worked from his hospital bed in the terminal cancer ward of the hospital). Sometimes he wouldn't log in, and I'd wonder if he finally kicked the bucket, or just wasn't feeling up to it, that day... Which meant that I'd be fielding 99.9% of the companies problems, by myself.
After a month and a half of reading bullshit excuses from my script, in response to customer complaints, I finally found out what the real problem was... Some customers were sending their automated messages with fucked up contact lists... Their job would run in error, and however long the contact list was, is how many of our 17,000 phone lines would suddenly become inactive. If I cancelled the job, those phone lines would become active again, and school cancellation messages would be received in a timely fashion, once again. But it gets worse... When the customer who sent the fucked up contact list realized their messages weren't being received in a timely fashion, they'd try again, still with a fucked up contact list. So if they bricked 500 phone lines the first time, now they've bricked 1,000.. And they wouldn't stop there... No, they'd brick all 17,000 before anyone in the company realized there was a problem, and the only reason they'd know is because my fucking phone would be ringing off the hook. But I was only trained on how to answer the phone and teach customers the proper way to use our software... I wasn't trained on how to fix errors.
2.5 months into my employment, they finally decided to tell me how to fix the errors, and in hind sight, I remembered seeing my first trainer (Tier 2) using a specific tool (website) to edit erroneous jobs that were stuck in error. But he had told me not to worry about that, just yet, and didn't even tell me the URL of the website.
2.5 months in, and suddenly, I'm able to correct the #1 problem haunting this company. We lost dozens of customers, maybe hundreds, because the people who knew how to fix the problem didn't come into work until after schools were supposed to have started. Once they told me that website URL, my phone never rang for that issue again. I set it as my browser homepage, and I'd sit there, staring at it, hitting refresh over and over again, waiting for an erroneous job to pop-up so I could fix it. I felt so much pride in the fact that I could fix such a huge problem before the customers even realized they'd done anything wrong. I'd even call the customers to inform them that their shit was fucked up, and how to fix it on their end, so it didn't happen again, and they generally appreciated the fuck out of those calls.
And then I got laid off, on my 89th day of employment. 1 more day and they'd owe me a severance package. You can't tell me the timing wasn't intentional. I did some research and found a bunch of blog posts from ex-employees, who were hired for 3 months through a temp agency, 3 months directly, and then laid off. The company does this every school year... They hire a bunch of people in the fall, promising them a bright future, and lay them off in the spring, because the phones don't ring in the summer time.
I really wish I had read those blog posts before I started working there, so I knew what I was getting into. I had an awesome seasonal summer job as a captain, and would have loved a seasonal winter job so I could continue working as a captain. Unfortunately, due to my naivety and the unfortunate (although extremely predictable) timing of my layoff, my captain's license had expired, I had just signed a 12 month lease on an apartment, and replaced my broken down car with the remainder of my savings, so I couldn't afford to renew my license right away. I missed half of the summer as a result, while I worked for minimum wage as a lifeguard, so I could afford my car payments and borrowed money from my grandparents so I could renew my captain's license.
If I had known how they treat their employees, I would never have signed that 12 month lease. I would have only agreed to work the 3 AM shift on the condition that I would only have to work from home, and I would have bought a POS off craigslist for $3k instead of a POS from a used car dealership for $8K with an 18% interest rate. I also would have submitted the paperwork to renew my captains license before it expired instead of after I got laid off, but I thought I needed to be available for my new career, year round, so I didn't bother.
The worst part is, that 90% of their employees would happily return year after year, if the company was upfront and admitted it was a seasonal job during the hiring process, but instead they promise you a gilded corporate ladder, and then yank it out from under you, like Charlie Brown playing football.
We could simultaneously robo-dial 17,000 phone lines for our customers.
I was initially hired for Tier 2 tech support (resolve support tickets by fixing configuration issues or escalating potential software bugs to the platform team), but after 4 days was "promoted" to Tier 1 customer service (answer phone calls) when the company decided to break it's outsourced contract with a call center in the Philippines. Customers hated talking to Philippians because they couldn't understand each other, and the Philippians weren't trained on our software, so all they did was take messages for Tier 2.
I didn't get much training for Tier 2, because we were understaffed, Tier 1 was useless, and therefor my trainer was too busy working to train me. But they had a different person train me (and 4 others) for Tier 1, and she demanded to be taken off the phone queue so she could dedicate her time to training. After a month of training us, they put us on the phones, and 1 week later, another group was added to the phones (yes, some of us got 1 month of training, others got 1 week...)
When the noobies got added to the phone queue, they changed my schedule from 9-5, to 3-1... That's 3 AM until 1 PM... Yes, 3:00 fucking O'clock, AM. 99.9% of our tech support calls happen at between 4-6 AM (last minute school cancellation time), yet there were only 2 people scheduled to answer the phones during those hours... Myself, and a guy I never physically met (because he worked from his hospital bed in the terminal cancer ward of the hospital). Sometimes he wouldn't log in, and I'd wonder if he finally kicked the bucket, or just wasn't feeling up to it, that day... Which meant that I'd be fielding 99.9% of the companies problems, by myself.
After a month and a half of reading bullshit excuses from my script, in response to customer complaints, I finally found out what the real problem was... Some customers were sending their automated messages with fucked up contact lists... Their job would run in error, and however long the contact list was, is how many of our 17,000 phone lines would suddenly become inactive. If I cancelled the job, those phone lines would become active again, and school cancellation messages would be received in a timely fashion, once again. But it gets worse... When the customer who sent the fucked up contact list realized their messages weren't being received in a timely fashion, they'd try again, still with a fucked up contact list. So if they bricked 500 phone lines the first time, now they've bricked 1,000.. And they wouldn't stop there... No, they'd brick all 17,000 before anyone in the company realized there was a problem, and the only reason they'd know is because my fucking phone would be ringing off the hook. But I was only trained on how to answer the phone and teach customers the proper way to use our software... I wasn't trained on how to fix errors.
2.5 months into my employment, they finally decided to tell me how to fix the errors, and in hind sight, I remembered seeing my first trainer (Tier 2) using a specific tool (website) to edit erroneous jobs that were stuck in error. But he had told me not to worry about that, just yet, and didn't even tell me the URL of the website.
2.5 months in, and suddenly, I'm able to correct the #1 problem haunting this company. We lost dozens of customers, maybe hundreds, because the people who knew how to fix the problem didn't come into work until after schools were supposed to have started. Once they told me that website URL, my phone never rang for that issue again. I set it as my browser homepage, and I'd sit there, staring at it, hitting refresh over and over again, waiting for an erroneous job to pop-up so I could fix it. I felt so much pride in the fact that I could fix such a huge problem before the customers even realized they'd done anything wrong. I'd even call the customers to inform them that their shit was fucked up, and how to fix it on their end, so it didn't happen again, and they generally appreciated the fuck out of those calls.
And then I got laid off, on my 89th day of employment. 1 more day and they'd owe me a severance package. You can't tell me the timing wasn't intentional. I did some research and found a bunch of blog posts from ex-employees, who were hired for 3 months through a temp agency, 3 months directly, and then laid off. The company does this every school year... They hire a bunch of people in the fall, promising them a bright future, and lay them off in the spring, because the phones don't ring in the summer time.
I really wish I had read those blog posts before I started working there, so I knew what I was getting into. I had an awesome seasonal summer job as a captain, and would have loved a seasonal winter job so I could continue working as a captain. Unfortunately, due to my naivety and the unfortunate (although extremely predictable) timing of my layoff, my captain's license had expired, I had just signed a 12 month lease on an apartment, and replaced my broken down car with the remainder of my savings, so I couldn't afford to renew my license right away. I missed half of the summer as a result, while I worked for minimum wage as a lifeguard, so I could afford my car payments and borrowed money from my grandparents so I could renew my captain's license.
If I had known how they treat their employees, I would never have signed that 12 month lease. I would have only agreed to work the 3 AM shift on the condition that I would only have to work from home, and I would have bought a POS off craigslist for $3k instead of a POS from a used car dealership for $8K with an 18% interest rate. I also would have submitted the paperwork to renew my captains license before it expired instead of after I got laid off, but I thought I needed to be available for my new career, year round, so I didn't bother.
The worst part is, that 90% of their employees would happily return year after year, if the company was upfront and admitted it was a seasonal job during the hiring process, but instead they promise you a gilded corporate ladder, and then yank it out from under you, like Charlie Brown playing football.
Re: the king
Damn, that sucks. I understand outsourcing work. My company still does this with people in India. They keep calling requesting help to do this and to try to understand how particular programs work to remotely test circuits. My company has shut down a couple of places in the US due to this outsourcing to India. Most of my employees know about this, which is why they really don't help them understand the programs we use to try to keep job security.
I used to work a seasonal job with H. R. Block. They would seasonally rent a location and open a tax office for the tax year. My job was to set up all the tax offices and then break them down at the end of the tax year. I had to setup 60 temporary tax offices. H. R. Block would keep 3 offices ongoing year round in different locations around the city. These were permanent offices. Later, I would stay on longer to break down all the computers and get them ready again for the next tax season. I probably had 1 - 1 1/2 months out of the year off. When I finally decided to do something else....become a mechanic. I worked on all vehicles, including the old classics. I also became a licensed vehicle state inspector, including CVI's (Commercial Vehicle Inspections - Semi's). Then your ac system on your vehicle went from R-12 to the new 134A refrigerant. My boss paid for myself and two others to learn how to retrofit an automotive ac from R-12 to the new 134A system. It was a bunch of work, swapping this out and changing this out, and cleaning this out to add the new refrigerant. When I decided to take a chance and mess around with my own when it went out. All I did was discharge the system, swap out the compressor, that went out, and add the new Ester Oil from the old Pag Oil. 134A runs about 20% higher on pressure than R-12, so I added 20% less to make the system function. Later, when a vehicle came in, I only added the Ester Oil to the system after draining some of the Pag Oil out, and added the new 134A refrigerant, and all the systems ran fine.
The reason for swapping the refrigerants from R-12 to 134A, was due to R-12 was depleting the ozone layer. You can't buy R-12 anymore, they do not make it. All your vehicles now only have 134A in them.
I used to work a seasonal job with H. R. Block. They would seasonally rent a location and open a tax office for the tax year. My job was to set up all the tax offices and then break them down at the end of the tax year. I had to setup 60 temporary tax offices. H. R. Block would keep 3 offices ongoing year round in different locations around the city. These were permanent offices. Later, I would stay on longer to break down all the computers and get them ready again for the next tax season. I probably had 1 - 1 1/2 months out of the year off. When I finally decided to do something else....become a mechanic. I worked on all vehicles, including the old classics. I also became a licensed vehicle state inspector, including CVI's (Commercial Vehicle Inspections - Semi's). Then your ac system on your vehicle went from R-12 to the new 134A refrigerant. My boss paid for myself and two others to learn how to retrofit an automotive ac from R-12 to the new 134A system. It was a bunch of work, swapping this out and changing this out, and cleaning this out to add the new refrigerant. When I decided to take a chance and mess around with my own when it went out. All I did was discharge the system, swap out the compressor, that went out, and add the new Ester Oil from the old Pag Oil. 134A runs about 20% higher on pressure than R-12, so I added 20% less to make the system function. Later, when a vehicle came in, I only added the Ester Oil to the system after draining some of the Pag Oil out, and added the new 134A refrigerant, and all the systems ran fine.
The reason for swapping the refrigerants from R-12 to 134A, was due to R-12 was depleting the ozone layer. You can't buy R-12 anymore, they do not make it. All your vehicles now only have 134A in them.
Re: the king
Not sure I understand what you mean here.perrinoia wrote:Not according to Fox news... LOL
That Fox News is relaying it doesn't deplete the ozone layer? Or you can't buy it anymore? On that statement, let me rephrase that. Yes, you can still buy it, but R-12 is not being made anymore. You can purchase what is left of the depleting supply, which the cost is outrageously high. (When they used to say an arm and a leg, they are not kidding when you price out what R-12 costs these days. Not only that, but you have to have an EPA license to purchase refrigerant.)
You can do a backyard retrofit by not replacing all the seals on your vehicle, but it's useless. It will work for awhile, but eventually the pressure from the 134A will break down the R-12 seals and leak out. You will eventually need to replace all the seals in the system. R-12 seals are black, 134A seals are light blue and made from a material to handle the pressure.
Re: the king
Ah gotchaperrinoia wrote:I was just making a joke about the Faux News and their disbelief of global warming.
