This is an extract from "Rich Kids" [How the Packers and the Murdochs lost $950 Million in One.Tel] by Paul Barry. 2002.
One.Tel were a Aussie Telco. 95-01. This event was noted about mid 2000.
Quote:
One might have thought that One.Tel's troubles would also have been obvious to anyone who entered the company's Sydney headquarters, because there were electronic scoreboards throughout the building that showed how many customers were stacked up in the call centre queue and how long they had been waiting.
The boards went red when the wait time rose above three minutes, and flashed red soon after that. Since they were displayed where all could see, there was not much chance of the warnings being missed, but there were ways to fool the system and One.Tel's managers became masters of the art of making the lights turn green.
One of the simplest ways to achieve this tranquillity was to have the call traffickers divert customers to the other call centres in Brisbane, Melbourne and Perth.
But this could be detected by anyone who looked at what was happening in those cities, so a better ruse was to pick up callers from the front of the Sydney queue and just dump them down at the back again.
An experienced dumper could get rid of 5,000 calls a day by answering the phone on mute, hitting the transfer button and pressing autodial, which brought the caller back into the One.Tel switchboard as a new call.
The trick worked wonders with the figures. The system scored the dumping as 5,000 calls answered and 5,000 fresh calls received so there was a huge increase in productivity and a corresponding fall in average wait times.
The drawback was that most calls weren't really answered, and One.Tel's customers went ballistic.
Having gritted their teeth for an hour to get through to a service rep, they heard the line go quiet for a moment, then encountered the 'Welcome to One.Tel' message all over again, at which point they realised they had waited in vain. No doubt this helped explain why four out of five callers gave up in disgust.
These little tricks of the trade were part of every call manager's repertoire, because their bonuses and reputations were greatly increased by making the figures look better than they were.
But the scams were encouraged by One.Tel's senior managers to make the figures look better for the directors.
'There was absolutely huge pressure on us to get the calls off the board', says one call centre manager, 'but it was a statistical thing' not a customer service thing. It didn't matter how, it was, "Just get them off the board".
The deception was also valuable in ensuring that visitors to One. Tel never discovered what an awful time customers were having.
Whenever analysts, investors or shareholders were brought round the building, the call centre manager was warned to have the boards on green by the time they arrived.
And here they had yet another dodge to fall back on.
By pushing a button on the PABX, one could 'busy out' the line, so that customers received the engaged signal. This rapidly reduced the number of calls waiting, because it stopped any new callers getting through.
'We would do this if there was someone important in the building', says one call manager, 'for purely aesthetic reasons'.
/Quote.
Just Classic!
One.Tel launched in May '95. As an Aussie Telco.
Had a market value of $5.3 Billion AUD November '99.
Went bust June '01.
Linear Mode
