It's hard to blame them for wanting that many 'white collar' jobs for youth. One of the challenges we've had in this region is employment for younger people. Call centres were viewed as a great job that wasn't in the service industry, in retail or seasonal.
Victoria still has few opportunities for young people outside of the main three sectors. And West was well liked as a job, I had friends working there, but they hated where it was situated. It was impractical for them to get there unless they had a car, and after a few months of working there they would realize their transportation costs, or time in transit or both, were outweighing any advantage of the job itself. So they'd quit and go back to retail/food services/seasonal jobs.
That depends entirely who you speak to: YES to the fact the location was not loved - to say the least. West in fact leaned heavily on BC Transit to improve bus service to the area and it was said and I was told - anecdotally - that there was little love lost between the two orgs as West pressed the issue more or less continually.
As to the jobs themselves most certainly for the front line call agents, given the modest pay and stresses of that position I wouldn't say most of them loved or even particularly liked those jobs. Fact is the facility was perpetually understaffed, call volumes especially in the first few months - remember we were supporting AT&T's US customers, so you can imagine what those daily call numbers looked like - were very, very high.
In fact we stumbled right out of the gate with only about 125-150 reps on the phones on Day 1 (we were aiming for 300), with senior Omaha mangers milling about already nervous about the inability to recruit the full complement of agents expected, the phone switch was opened on the brand new state of the art Ayaya system - and almost 15,000 calls were immediately dumped into the queue as a result of a major switch failure.
Internally it was known as the "day the Cloud lost its mind". That was not a fun day for anyone, either the local IT team desperately trying to figure out the issue, or the poor reps on the phones wondering what particular gate of hell had just dawned upon them. Nor for us managers frankly, with the Omaha contingent breathing down our necks.
On a personal level I had zero issues with them and in fact liked many of them on that basis but they really were not a poster child org promoting a healthy work-life balance. I got the very strong sense from especially those higher in that hierarchy they very much considered who they were was very largely defined by their work and how hard they worked and what their job titles were. Almost without exception most were focused on climbing the corporate ladder regardless of impact on health, family. One guy in HO very proudly told me after a recent heart attack he was back in the saddle literally just days later. Not my cuppa, but whatever, you push through and move on with whatever cards you're dealt.
However US business practices are US business practices which often differ from or are at loggerheads with those endemic to this area.
For starters an admission from them that American customers weren't exactly thrilled with the notion of "foreign" customer support so our teams were absolutely forbidden from identifying themselves as Canadian or even hinting we were located in Canada. Instead they were "coached" i.e. compelled per standing policy, to say when asked "where are you?" to respond with "....just north of Seattle". Not technically a lie but also not 100% honest either. This bothered a lot of the reps especially younger ones with limited experience in a large office/corporate environment who couldn't understand why they could't be truthful and forthcoming and of course did not understand the reason underpinning the policy.
The previously mentioned ten minute coffee breaks also were not remotely met with great enthusiasm.
Consider your cubicle sits in the very farthest corner of a 70,000 s/f floor plate. Its break time and you want to go for a smoke. You have to logout of the queue - the break clock starts immediately at that point. You have 600 seconds and not one second more before phones from the monitoring stations start ringing and that is no exaggeration.
Breaks from the queues were monitored not only by what was called the Podium in Victoria, literally an elevated part of the floor where the "traffic cops" of the call center monitored everything and everyone, but also from the master call center monitoring stations in Omaha HO, which monitored the status of all call agents in all of their global call centers throughout the business day, wherever that happened to be.
You then have to walk the length of that space, through a set of secure doors, down a hallway, turn left through another set of double doors, walk through the staff break room go outside to the official smoking pit. By the time you've done that - and consider the same on the return trip - that left about 3/3.5 minutes at most to light up and 'enjoy' that cigarette before heading back and jumping into the queue. Not exactly a break by the standards of most people. We tried many times to get West to budge on this issue and increase the breaks to 15 minutes. No way, no dice.
I must say here that the Omaha agent monitoring facility itself was impressive as hell. We toured it the week they put it into production. At that time, in 2001, it was the fourth largest 'large screen' master call control facility in the US (think of those old films of NASA Mission Control during the Apollo missions and you get the general idea). In size, scale, scope and technology it was exceeded only by NASA itself, AT&T and one other org that escapes me at this point. Doesn't matter - it was HUGE with incredible agent and global call monitoring capability and technology. The amusing thing when we were there and they were still testing it, across the 3 massive screens in the center, each about 10 meters across, they were running an old Simpson's episode which was a slightly bizarre sight in that very serious environment.....
Now from the standpoint of those staff not in a call taking role I agree many of them were relatively happy and at the very least found West personally and professionally interesting and challenging: those who gained experience as team leads and supervisors for example, or those in the Training department.
As one of two Operations managers during my time I had up to 300 staff reporting to me through the supervisors down to the team lead level. Each "pod" consisted of about 16-18 call reps who reported to the TL who in turn reported to the supervisors. Each supervisor as I recall had three pods reporting to them. And there were five sups reporting to me; ditto on the other side for the other ops manager.
The TL's and Sups certainly were exposed to a very large corporate environment, gained hands on experience with managing staff, handling customer escalations - there were lots of those! - call flow and management reporting etc.
In addition, and again we had to twist Omaha's arm but this time they actually agreed with allowing supervisors to sit in on the weekly management call with HO. That was no small feat either. It certainly opened a few eyes. Those calls were open, honest - brutally so in many cases - blunt and not remotely "PC" even if the subject was a sensitive one. Omaha said in no uncertain terms what it wanted, what it needed, what it expected, who was responsible and when, how, and where. It was very much management from the top-down, command and control school of management. Agreeing to have the supervisors attend these meetings was one of the very few times they agreed with a deviation in established procedure suggested by Victoria.
I know some of those sups especially benefited ultimately in their later careers because I've encountered at least two of them in management roles, both in the BCG environment; my old Ops manager 'twin' in fact worked for Maximus for several years - where I am now - after she left West. She is now a director also with the BCG, and even today in Maximus we have two senior supervisors in our own contact center who once reported to me at West. So safe to say all those folks 'liked' West. Not so sure you'd get that much buy in from the ex call reps though, heh.....
STAY CONNECTED TO VIBRANTVICTORIA
WHAT'S HAPPENING ON CITIFIED VICTORIA
