The worst I've seen for being transitioned out was at WaMu 7 years ago. We were working an insanely busy call center for consumer lending, and we'd been under a hiring freeze for months. Things were going poorly - no new employees except contractors, a new software suite that was failing badly, and it was the middle of the refi-boom of '03-'04 so we had a huge influx of new loans to service, software that couldn't hack it, and nowhere near enough employees to service all of these new loans. We'd gone from an average hold time of 2mins with an SLA of 97% before the software change to an average hold time of 3hrs with an SLA of 0% immediately following the software roll out - this thing just couldn't do shit, it was marking people as delinquent when they were paying their loans and lines on time, denying funds to people with over a million dollars available on their HELOCs, canceling credit cards, you name it.
Anyway, the call center was open from 6am to 7pm, and we had 200+ people in queue at 6am when we got to work, and sometimes in excess of 100 people still in queue at 7 when we closed, which the closing teams had to stay and take care of, but were then being disciplined for having too much OT on their paychecks. That stopped when someone was fired for clearing the queue in 2 minutes by just picking up and hanging up until the calls were gone. So April rolls around and we're pretty used to massive queues and no time between calls, but we come in one morning and there are no calls in queue. None. There's nothing holding, the SLA is 99% and the average hold time is 30sec. We log on to our computers and everyone has an email from corporate that there are going to be conference calls throughout the day and each one will involve several teams, no one is allowed to talk about what was said during the call to anyone who hasn't been in one yet, etc.
Our team's call wasn't until 1pm or so, and we get in there and hear that they're shutting down this call center and moving to a different location (which had already started taking the call volume from us that morning) that was 22.5 miles away. Now, 22.5 miles isn't that far. It's a little less that what I commute one way now, but most of the people working at that call center were already commuting for an hour or more to get to work, and the way the new call center was situated from the old one would have added about 90 minutes for most of us, so for 90% of the staff transitioning to the new location was completely out of the question. Problem was, WaMu had a policy that unless they moved your job 25 miles or more away from you, you weren't due any sort of severence package or assistance finding a new position within the company or anything nice like that. If you didn't decide to move to the new location, it was termed as a voluntary quit and you were just S.O.L. One of my buddies and I had lunch right after the meeting ended and walked the two blocks to Pike Place Brewery for some beers and burgers and came back half sloshed.
It backfired for WaMu though, they thought they were going to get the cream of the crop from our location to go to the new location and train all of the new reps, but they got a grand total of 10 transfers. The rest of us just worked until the center closed down and left the company.
Anyway, the call center was open from 6am to 7pm, and we had 200+ people in queue at 6am when we got to work, and sometimes in excess of 100 people still in queue at 7 when we closed, which the closing teams had to stay and take care of, but were then being disciplined for having too much OT on their paychecks. That stopped when someone was fired for clearing the queue in 2 minutes by just picking up and hanging up until the calls were gone. So April rolls around and we're pretty used to massive queues and no time between calls, but we come in one morning and there are no calls in queue. None. There's nothing holding, the SLA is 99% and the average hold time is 30sec. We log on to our computers and everyone has an email from corporate that there are going to be conference calls throughout the day and each one will involve several teams, no one is allowed to talk about what was said during the call to anyone who hasn't been in one yet, etc.
Our team's call wasn't until 1pm or so, and we get in there and hear that they're shutting down this call center and moving to a different location (which had already started taking the call volume from us that morning) that was 22.5 miles away. Now, 22.5 miles isn't that far. It's a little less that what I commute one way now, but most of the people working at that call center were already commuting for an hour or more to get to work, and the way the new call center was situated from the old one would have added about 90 minutes for most of us, so for 90% of the staff transitioning to the new location was completely out of the question. Problem was, WaMu had a policy that unless they moved your job 25 miles or more away from you, you weren't due any sort of severence package or assistance finding a new position within the company or anything nice like that. If you didn't decide to move to the new location, it was termed as a voluntary quit and you were just S.O.L. One of my buddies and I had lunch right after the meeting ended and walked the two blocks to Pike Place Brewery for some beers and burgers and came back half sloshed.
It backfired for WaMu though, they thought they were going to get the cream of the crop from our location to go to the new location and train all of the new reps, but they got a grand total of 10 transfers. The rest of us just worked until the center closed down and left the company.
The thought of this happening terrifies me.
