July 23, 2021 • 20 mins
The Tokyo Olympics are now officially under way and they will definitely be an Olympics like no other. Happening amid the pandemic and rising numbers locally in Japan, these Games will also not have any spectators. The big question now is how that might affect the athletes, having no cheering fans and the bigger concern, not having their families present. Questions have also been raised about athletes not being subject to the usual, rigorous drug testing standards. Erin Doherty, reporter at Axios, joins us for more.
Next, there is a harsh reality for many that work as customer service agents. Many big companies often use contractors that have agents working from home to help you when you have a problem. They are often caught in the middle between abusive callers and corporate mandates to make the customer feel better. One of the unspoken rules is that the agents cannot hang up on an abusive caller no matter how bad it gets. Calling out sick could get you fired, managers track your time, and sometimes you have to absorb start-up costs. Ariana Tobin, reporter at ProPublica, joins us for how bad it is for some customer service agents.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's Friday July. I'm Oscar Ramirez in Los Angeles and
this is the daily Dive. The Tokyo Olympics are now
officially underway and they will be definitely an Olympics like
no other, happening amid the pandemic and rising numbers locally
in Japan. These games will also not have any spectators.
(00:22):
The big question is how that might affect the athletes
having no cheering fans and the bigger concern not having
their families present. Questions have also been raised about athletes
not being subject to the usual rigorous drug testing standards.
Aaron Doherty, reporter at Axios, joins us for more Next.
There's a harsh reality for many that work as customer
(00:43):
service agents. Many big companies often use contractors that have
agents working from home to help you when you have
a problem. They are often caught in the middle between
abusive callers and corporate mandates to make the customer feel better.
One of the unspoken rules is that the agents cannot
hang up on an abuse of collar, no matter how
bad it gets. Calling out sick could also get you fired.
(01:03):
Managers track your time, and sometimes you have to absorb
startup cost Arianna Tobin, reporter at Pro Publica, joins us
for how bad it is for some customer service agents.
It's news without the noise. Let's dive in to shame
to the Japanese people really did uh uh and unfortunate
(01:25):
there's no spectators. We've got a job to do. We type, um,
we take out what the I say, which is destroying
Olympic Committee and International committee. Um we type what si um.
On board joining us now is Aaron Doherty, reporter at Axios.
Thanks for joining us, Aaron, thank you so much for
having me. The Olympics are on in full swing now.
(01:48):
It really is an Olympics like no other. There's so
many things happening. Obviously, it's happening in Tokyo right now
amid the pandemic and there's rising numbers of cases there
in Tokyo. We're also seeing this whole thing where there's
nobody going to be in the stands. It's really gonna
be mostly a TV only affair. And for the athletes
there that are competing on the ground, it's gonna be
(02:09):
a lot different. They're not going to have the hype,
the crowds hyping them up. Some of that national pride
is gonna be a little hard to find sometimes when
the fans aren't chanting for you when you're going up there. So, Aaron,
you looked into that a little bit and what psychologists
are speculating on what's going to happen with this. So yeah,
as you said, it's no Olympics like no other. I
think sort of the bottom line as a lot of
psychologists don't know for sure how a spectator list Olympics
(02:32):
may or may not impact athletes performance. What we do
know is there are some Olympians who have expressed concern
and sort of just disappointment over this fan list games.
The moon bios had told the Associated Press that she
likes to feed off of the crowd and she's a
little bit worried how she do under the circumstances. And
I talked to a first time Olympians on the woman's
track and field team, and you know, she's disappointed that
(02:53):
she wants those experienced sort of the excitement that comes
with going to be a game. And the psychologist that
I talked to, they, you know, both sort of said
that we don't know what's going to happen. There is
prior research that suggests that the presence of other people
tends to enhance somebody's performance when they're performing a task
that is second nature. So for these athletes, for instance,
who you know, are practiced and daily, you know, multiple
(03:16):
hours a day, and so practicing their sporty second nature
to them. There is research that suggests that the presence
of other people can sort of raise the stakes and
enhance performance. But again, there is research that really applies
specifically to the Olympics because they are such a unique
event and there will be people watching virtually and there
are still very high stakes with Olympic medals on the line.
So well, you know, it's it remains to be seen.
(03:37):
I guess what will happen, um, But in psychologists don't know.
I guess, yeah, you know, I suspect that not much
will change, right these are top tier athletes competing at
the highest level. They're there to do a job and
get it done and win, right there, highly competitive in
their own world, So I suspect that it won't change
that much. But but yes, so that overall feeling might change,
you know, it could impact them. I think one of
(04:00):
the bigger concerns that some of these psychologists say is
the absence of the families of the athletes, and that one,
that one seems to ring a little truer right there.
You know, you know, after you compete, if you win,
you know, you want to share with those that are
closest to you. And a lot of these athletes families
aren't going to be there, so their team support systems
are gonna have to be stronger than ever. That was
(04:21):
an interesting part of the reporting that I did. Both
psychologists said that the bigger concern is perhaps that the
athletes families will not be there, and you know, Sam
Summers to the tough university psychologists. He cited other research
that showed that having a social support of families and
friends can be really important for athletes mental health. And
so you know, having their families and friends like thousands
of miles away in some in most cases, you know,
(04:43):
that is again, these athletes really are going to have
to lead on each other and find other ways to
connect with their families. A couple of things they do
have going for them, I guess is you know, we
went through a year of all of this, you know,
with NFL games, MLB games, n PA games, where they
already did the fan this experience, and it gets beyond that.
You know, everybody's in the same boat at least, right
(05:04):
you know, no, no one, no one country is cheering
louder for another than you know, they're all going to
be at the same place that way exactly. That was,
you know, sort of the bottom line of what Sam
Summers concluded was, you know, these are top notch athletes,
there were world class and they're all sort of performing
in the same quiet field. So um, there's you know, no,
I guess there's no home field advantage. Yeah, exactly, I'm
(05:27):
hyped up for this. I always love the Olympics, so
I'm excited to see how it all turns out. One
of the other things that people were raising questions about
were drug testing during the pandemic. They paused a lot
of these these tests because you know, obviously other reasons
where other things were happening, and you know, not to
say that they're going into the Olympics without the proper test,
(05:48):
but maybe early on in trials and other things like that,
people were just raising concern about it. But yeah, I
wrote about that today as well. I think again, you know,
there's sort of you know a lot of uncertainty surrounding
many aspects of the pandemic, but I think one aspect
that people have raised questions over is the fact that
during the kind of early months of the coronavirus, for
approximately three months, all drug test programs, pretty much all
(06:09):
drug testing programs have to be suspended, and there were
other sort of pilot programs that were launched by different
programs to continue drug testing, but by and large there
were people who were not being tested in about you know,
April of that's sort of another question going into these
games of there we're just not as string in of
drug testing requirements about you know, a year and a
(06:30):
half ago, and so sort of how will that play out?
You know, the World Anti Doping Agency has come out
and said that they've really ramped up their testing and
their back to full capacity in recent months. So it
shouldn't be you know, it's not like people have not
been drug tested. That's very important to note, but it's
just again, there was sort of a wrench in the
plan of of the Olympics. Yeah, and I guess there
was a lot of records that were being set early
(06:51):
on and that was kind of a concern. They're like,
what's going on here? I don't want to diminish the
accomplishments of any of these athletes or of things, but it's,
like I said, since there was a pause is in
these drug testing program because of the pandemic. That's where
all these kind of questions come up. You know, there
are people have been pointing to other factors that could
be at play. I think people are talking about shoe
technology or these athletes. A lot of the records were
(07:14):
happening in tracking field events and they were sort of
pointing to just these athletes may have just been really
ready to run because they've been kind of like inside
for for a while. But so again, yeah, there's you know,
there's no hard evidence of it, but it's drugs impacting performance.
But it's just sort of, you know, adds to the
complience of factors that are kind of circulating in these
very unusual Olympic Games. Aaron Doherty, reporter at Axios. Thank
(07:39):
you very much for joining us. Thank you so much
for having me. One day, her son comes home and
he's like knocking on the door because he's broken his wrist,
and she feels so much pressure to you know, not
(08:00):
call in sick, not call in for an emergency that
she like really have to go to great lengths to
try to convince everyone that she can't work because her
internet is out. Joining us now is Arianna Tobin, reporter
at pro Publica. Thanks for joining us, Arianna, thanks for
having me. I wanted to talk about the harsh realities
(08:22):
of working in customer service. So if you've ever called Airbnb,
home depot into It, which does turbo tax A, T
and T, you know, just a bevy of companies they
often outsource some of their customer service representatives to other companies,
and then the people that work at these companies, you know,
a lot of times have a hard time dealing with
everything from crappy customers to really harsh working conditions, you know,
(08:46):
being on the clock and meeting quotas and all this stuff.
It can get pretty pretty bad for a lot of them. So, Arianna,
you you wrote up a story kind of talking to
a lot of customer service reps and kind of what
they go through and some we've got some pretty amazing
stories out of there. But if we can start off
by setting up the profile, who are these customer service reps?
They're mostly women. So these customer service reps are mostly women,
(09:11):
and they're mostly women who needed to work from home
long before the pandemic. So a lot of these people
they need to be near children, they have caretaking responsibilities
for older family members or six family members. Some of
the people I talked to lived in rural areas where
it was really difficult to get to places where they
(09:34):
could find an office job. And a lot of these
are people usually I mean, these for the most part
are not high paying jobs, and so there are people
who needed work and this was the kind of work
that was most suited to them. We talked to a
number of people with disabilities, you know, ranging from like
physical disabilities to mental health issues, where it was just
(09:56):
very difficult for them to go to an office in person.
So the short version of this story is there are
people who really needed to work and who when they
found an opportunity to work from home building halls from
their house, really felt like it was a gon intend
And that's so important to stress because a lot of
people will say, well, you hate your job or you
(10:18):
don't like the conditions, why don't you just quit? You know,
not everybody's in that position. Some people get onto something
and they want to keep it, and they need the money, right,
So that's why, you know, once we get into some
of these pretty harrowing stories, that's why these people stayed
and dealt with how bad it is. And you know,
so these a lot of times the customer service reps
are caught in the middle. Obviously on the side of
the consumer. A lot of times we're already calling with
(10:41):
a problem, so we might be a little angry already,
and then they have to balance the needs of the
company themselves across the board. It seems like, whether it's
a written rule or not, they tell you do not
hang up on a customer. You have to listen tom
listen to them, you know, speak their piece basically on it. So,
if you think about it from the respective of the company,
(11:01):
customer services really important, right. It's one of the only
times when you, as a customer, are probably directly going
to be talking to someone who you know, for all
intents and purposes, you assume is literally representing their brand.
So to many of these companies, their brand is extremely important.
(11:23):
They want you to walk away feeling like you've had
a problem resolved. Yes, as you said, these are people
who if you're calling with an issue, it means you
have an issue, so you're probably pretty angry, and so
to make sure that that happens and to make sure
that they feel like the customer service representatives are presenting
them in the best way, they need to maintain pretty
(11:45):
strict control. And a lot of what we found in
our reporting was that it gets really, really, really specific.
So for some of these companies, they're really monitoring down
to the number of seconds that the call goes silent.
It's a metric called no talking time, where it's like
down I think in one case to the seventh decimal point,
(12:08):
just making sure that the agents is it's like a
quality control mechanism for them. But when you're looking at
these as performance metrics or something that's grading how well
the customer service agents is living up to what the
company expects, it can be really rigid, really strict, and
really scary. Okay, so let's get into some examples, because
(12:30):
some of these are pretty amazing. And as we mentioned,
you spoke to a ton of different people and these
are just some really representative examples of what a lot
of them go through. And we'll start off with your
first example, someone named Christine Stewart. She was taking calls
and chats for into It and Turbo Tax, and this
kind of illustrates the strict monitoring and threats to be fired.
You know, if you call out or something right away,
(12:51):
they're telling you, well, you might be fired, and some
of the other strict stuff, no outside noise. This is
kind of her experience. Yeah, Christine, she work for Turbo Tax,
and I think the most striking part of her story
to me, she was also a mom and she specifically
wanted this job because she had two kids at home
and she just needed to be there to get them
(13:13):
on the bus every day. And she said it took
five minutes, but it was really problematic to be taking
that kind of five minute break. And one day her
son comes home and he's like knocking on the door
because he's broken his wrist, and she feels so much
pressure to you know, not call in sick, not call
in for an emergency, that she like really has to
(13:37):
go to great lengths to try to convince everyone that
she can't work because her internet is out, and so
she really does feel like she's had this job specifically
because she wants to be home with her kids. Her
son breaks his wrist and she feels like she can't
take care of him, So I should say it's important
to know that in all of this reporting, we also
(13:59):
went to the companies, and we went to both the
company who these agents are taking calls for and the
contractors who they for the most part work for. UM
And I say for the most part, because there's a
bunch of different employment models here and most of them
said that they don't have a no hang up policy.
But from what we understood from talking to a number
(14:21):
of agents is that even if there's no written policy,
it seems to be the understanding among agents, among trainers,
and among the people who are actually doing these jobs
like it's really the lived reality. I mean, yeah, across
the board, it seemed like that's what everybody was feeling.
And also to back that up, you know, you guys
went through a lot of ways to verify a lot
(14:42):
of these details, where you could Facebook screenshots, email exchanges,
a lot of different things that these people would share
with you just to kind of verify their stories. So
that's pretty bad. One of the other running themes, obviously
is the verbal abuse too. Obviously, as we mentioned, people
are calling in with problems they get if they feel
like they're not getting help. You know, they can get
pretty testy in and the verbal abuse comes. You talked
(15:03):
about an agent who's taking calls for Bath and body
Works and she was getting it from a lot of customers,
are a lot of consumers, so her work with Bath
and body Works, she was very limited in what she
was able to kind of do on some of these
customers behalf and they would be say, running a promotion
like you can get two lotions for the price of one,
(15:25):
and she had to stick really closely to whatever the
policy said. And when she would repeat that, when she
would say that, a lot of customers and she told us,
would basically screen at her. And you know, it's like
their frustration with the company ended up coming out as
their frustration to her of her. Yeah, and and as
(15:46):
I mentioned, the verbal abuse can get pretty bad. You know,
they can get you know, until racial epithets, all sorts
of stuff that they have to deal with. And you know,
as we keep kind of reiterating there, there's this unspoken
no hangup rule, so you just have to kind of
take it until they either put or out or something.
One of the other interesting things is uh an agent
that was taken calls for Home depot, and I guess
(16:07):
in that one. As you mentioned, there's different business models,
they had to absorb some startup costs, even of you
know whatever, buying your computer, buying some equipment, just so
you can start that job. Yes, so this agent was
taking calls through a contractor called Arise Virtual Solutions. And
what Rise the Virtual Solutions have done is they've basically
(16:28):
taken the gig economy models like you'd see an uber
or lift, where they pretty much frame it as like
you are your own boss, you have your own company,
but will let you use our platform to be able
to take customer service calls. So that all sounds quite
complicated and it is, but in reality, what it boils
(16:51):
down to is that an agent who signs up to
be an Arise agent pays for all of their own training,
they pay for all of their own equipment, They have
a platform see deducted from every paycheck. And while there
are some agents who managed to make money out of this,
we've actually talked to quite a few Arise agents who
(17:14):
actually lost money on the deal or significant chunks of
their paycheck to the point where they were making below
minimum wage. Yes, some spend as much as a thousand
dollars on training and equipment, and I mean for somebody
that needs a job. You know, you're hoping that it
pays off in the long run, but that's a pretty
high number just coming in, you know, just the start,
and that's pretty tough. I mean, again, from the perspective
(17:37):
of the companies here, if the agents are the one
picking up those costs like paying for training, paying for equipment,
that means the company doesn't have to pay for those things.
It also means they don't have to pay for normal
employment costs like benefits, so they don't have to feel
the health insurance costs, they don't have to pay for
payroll taxes. It's cheaper for both arise the contract extor,
(18:00):
which lets them in turn offer a lower premium to
the brands they're trying to get to hire them. As
you mentioned, you've reached out to a lot of these
companies to get their response on you know what some
of their employees have been saying overall, what are they
saying about some of these pretty harsh conditions that we
hear about. So most of the contractors say they want
(18:23):
the working experience to be good for the agents. They say,
you know, we're trying our best. Most of the companies
who are fielding these calls, they, you know, something pretty similar.
A couple of them say, look, we're not the employers here,
it's on the contractor, like you know, it's their responsibility,
not ours, which of course makes them say, we're not
(18:44):
responsible for these things. A number of the companies didn't
get back to us, including Psychs, the company that Christine
Stewart at the agent we were talking about before with
the Sun who broke his wrist. They didn't get back
to us, they didn't provide any sort of comment. And
a few of the other companies we name any other brands,
they didn't give us any comment. Wow. Well, I mean,
(19:05):
it's just an interesting story. There's a lot of examples here.
I suggest everybody go and check out Ariana's piece on
this because there's some pretty interesting stuff, things that kind
of piss you off when you hear about it too so,
and you know, I guess if you're calling in with
a complaint somewhere, take a deep breath before you get
racked with people. Arianna Tobin, reporter at pro PUBLICA, thank
(19:26):
you very much for joining us, Thanks for having me.
Please be kind to your customer service agents. They're trying.
That's it for today. Join us on social media at
Daily Dive, pond on both Twitter and Instagram, Leave us
a comment, give us a rating, and tell us the
(19:47):
stories that you're interested in. Follow us on our Heart Radio,
or subscribe wherever you get your podcast. This episode of
The Daily Divers produced by vig Right and engineered by
Tony Sarantina. Hi'm oscar Mere and this was her Daily
die
It's Friday July. I'm Oscar Ramirez in Los Angeles and
this is the daily Dive. The Tokyo Olympics are now
officially underway and they will be definitely an Olympics like
no other, happening amid the pandemic and rising numbers locally
in Japan. These games will also not have any spectators.
(00:22):
The big question is how that might affect the athletes
having no cheering fans and the bigger concern not having
their families present. Questions have also been raised about athletes
not being subject to the usual rigorous drug testing standards.
Aaron Doherty, reporter at Axios, joins us for more Next.
There's a harsh reality for many that work as customer
(00:43):
service agents. Many big companies often use contractors that have
agents working from home to help you when you have
a problem. They are often caught in the middle between
abusive callers and corporate mandates to make the customer feel better.
One of the unspoken rules is that the agents cannot
hang up on an abuse of collar, no matter how
bad it gets. Calling out sick could also get you fired.
(01:03):
Managers track your time, and sometimes you have to absorb
startup cost Arianna Tobin, reporter at Pro Publica, joins us
for how bad it is for some customer service agents.
It's news without the noise. Let's dive in to shame
to the Japanese people really did uh uh and unfortunate
(01:25):
there's no spectators. We've got a job to do. We type, um,
we take out what the I say, which is destroying
Olympic Committee and International committee. Um we type what si um.
On board joining us now is Aaron Doherty, reporter at Axios.
Thanks for joining us, Aaron, thank you so much for
having me. The Olympics are on in full swing now.
(01:48):
It really is an Olympics like no other. There's so
many things happening. Obviously, it's happening in Tokyo right now
amid the pandemic and there's rising numbers of cases there
in Tokyo. We're also seeing this whole thing where there's
nobody going to be in the stands. It's really gonna
be mostly a TV only affair. And for the athletes
there that are competing on the ground, it's gonna be
(02:09):
a lot different. They're not going to have the hype,
the crowds hyping them up. Some of that national pride
is gonna be a little hard to find sometimes when
the fans aren't chanting for you when you're going up there. So, Aaron,
you looked into that a little bit and what psychologists
are speculating on what's going to happen with this. So yeah,
as you said, it's no Olympics like no other. I
think sort of the bottom line as a lot of
psychologists don't know for sure how a spectator list Olympics
(02:32):
may or may not impact athletes performance. What we do
know is there are some Olympians who have expressed concern
and sort of just disappointment over this fan list games.
The moon bios had told the Associated Press that she
likes to feed off of the crowd and she's a
little bit worried how she do under the circumstances. And
I talked to a first time Olympians on the woman's
track and field team, and you know, she's disappointed that
(02:53):
she wants those experienced sort of the excitement that comes
with going to be a game. And the psychologist that
I talked to, they, you know, both sort of said
that we don't know what's going to happen. There is
prior research that suggests that the presence of other people
tends to enhance somebody's performance when they're performing a task
that is second nature. So for these athletes, for instance,
who you know, are practiced and daily, you know, multiple
(03:16):
hours a day, and so practicing their sporty second nature
to them. There is research that suggests that the presence
of other people can sort of raise the stakes and
enhance performance. But again, there is research that really applies
specifically to the Olympics because they are such a unique
event and there will be people watching virtually and there
are still very high stakes with Olympic medals on the line.
So well, you know, it's it remains to be seen.
(03:37):
I guess what will happen, um, But in psychologists don't know.
I guess, yeah, you know, I suspect that not much
will change, right these are top tier athletes competing at
the highest level. They're there to do a job and
get it done and win, right there, highly competitive in
their own world, So I suspect that it won't change
that much. But but yes, so that overall feeling might change,
you know, it could impact them. I think one of
(04:00):
the bigger concerns that some of these psychologists say is
the absence of the families of the athletes, and that one,
that one seems to ring a little truer right there.
You know, you know, after you compete, if you win,
you know, you want to share with those that are
closest to you. And a lot of these athletes families
aren't going to be there, so their team support systems
are gonna have to be stronger than ever. That was
(04:21):
an interesting part of the reporting that I did. Both
psychologists said that the bigger concern is perhaps that the
athletes families will not be there, and you know, Sam
Summers to the tough university psychologists. He cited other research
that showed that having a social support of families and
friends can be really important for athletes mental health. And
so you know, having their families and friends like thousands
of miles away in some in most cases, you know,
(04:43):
that is again, these athletes really are going to have
to lead on each other and find other ways to
connect with their families. A couple of things they do
have going for them, I guess is you know, we
went through a year of all of this, you know,
with NFL games, MLB games, n PA games, where they
already did the fan this experience, and it gets beyond that.
You know, everybody's in the same boat at least, right
(05:04):
you know, no, no one, no one country is cheering
louder for another than you know, they're all going to
be at the same place that way exactly. That was,
you know, sort of the bottom line of what Sam
Summers concluded was, you know, these are top notch athletes,
there were world class and they're all sort of performing
in the same quiet field. So um, there's you know, no,
I guess there's no home field advantage. Yeah, exactly, I'm
(05:27):
hyped up for this. I always love the Olympics, so
I'm excited to see how it all turns out. One
of the other things that people were raising questions about
were drug testing during the pandemic. They paused a lot
of these these tests because you know, obviously other reasons
where other things were happening, and you know, not to
say that they're going into the Olympics without the proper test,
(05:48):
but maybe early on in trials and other things like that,
people were just raising concern about it. But yeah, I
wrote about that today as well. I think again, you know,
there's sort of you know a lot of uncertainty surrounding
many aspects of the pandemic, but I think one aspect
that people have raised questions over is the fact that
during the kind of early months of the coronavirus, for
approximately three months, all drug test programs, pretty much all
(06:09):
drug testing programs have to be suspended, and there were
other sort of pilot programs that were launched by different
programs to continue drug testing, but by and large there
were people who were not being tested in about you know,
April of that's sort of another question going into these
games of there we're just not as string in of
drug testing requirements about you know, a year and a
(06:30):
half ago, and so sort of how will that play out?
You know, the World Anti Doping Agency has come out
and said that they've really ramped up their testing and
their back to full capacity in recent months. So it
shouldn't be you know, it's not like people have not
been drug tested. That's very important to note, but it's
just again, there was sort of a wrench in the
plan of of the Olympics. Yeah, and I guess there
was a lot of records that were being set early
(06:51):
on and that was kind of a concern. They're like,
what's going on here? I don't want to diminish the
accomplishments of any of these athletes or of things, but it's,
like I said, since there was a pause is in
these drug testing program because of the pandemic. That's where
all these kind of questions come up. You know, there
are people have been pointing to other factors that could
be at play. I think people are talking about shoe
technology or these athletes. A lot of the records were
(07:14):
happening in tracking field events and they were sort of
pointing to just these athletes may have just been really
ready to run because they've been kind of like inside
for for a while. But so again, yeah, there's you know,
there's no hard evidence of it, but it's drugs impacting performance.
But it's just sort of, you know, adds to the
complience of factors that are kind of circulating in these
very unusual Olympic Games. Aaron Doherty, reporter at Axios. Thank
(07:39):
you very much for joining us. Thank you so much
for having me. One day, her son comes home and
he's like knocking on the door because he's broken his wrist,
and she feels so much pressure to you know, not
(08:00):
call in sick, not call in for an emergency that
she like really have to go to great lengths to
try to convince everyone that she can't work because her
internet is out. Joining us now is Arianna Tobin, reporter
at pro Publica. Thanks for joining us, Arianna, thanks for
having me. I wanted to talk about the harsh realities
(08:22):
of working in customer service. So if you've ever called Airbnb,
home depot into It, which does turbo tax A, T
and T, you know, just a bevy of companies they
often outsource some of their customer service representatives to other companies,
and then the people that work at these companies, you know,
a lot of times have a hard time dealing with
everything from crappy customers to really harsh working conditions, you know,
(08:46):
being on the clock and meeting quotas and all this stuff.
It can get pretty pretty bad for a lot of them. So, Arianna,
you you wrote up a story kind of talking to
a lot of customer service reps and kind of what
they go through and some we've got some pretty amazing
stories out of there. But if we can start off
by setting up the profile, who are these customer service reps?
They're mostly women. So these customer service reps are mostly women,
(09:11):
and they're mostly women who needed to work from home
long before the pandemic. So a lot of these people
they need to be near children, they have caretaking responsibilities
for older family members or six family members. Some of
the people I talked to lived in rural areas where
it was really difficult to get to places where they
(09:34):
could find an office job. And a lot of these
are people usually I mean, these for the most part
are not high paying jobs, and so there are people
who needed work and this was the kind of work
that was most suited to them. We talked to a
number of people with disabilities, you know, ranging from like
physical disabilities to mental health issues, where it was just
(09:56):
very difficult for them to go to an office in person.
So the short version of this story is there are
people who really needed to work and who when they
found an opportunity to work from home building halls from
their house, really felt like it was a gon intend
And that's so important to stress because a lot of
people will say, well, you hate your job or you
(10:18):
don't like the conditions, why don't you just quit? You know,
not everybody's in that position. Some people get onto something
and they want to keep it, and they need the money, right,
So that's why, you know, once we get into some
of these pretty harrowing stories, that's why these people stayed
and dealt with how bad it is. And you know,
so these a lot of times the customer service reps
are caught in the middle. Obviously on the side of
the consumer. A lot of times we're already calling with
(10:41):
a problem, so we might be a little angry already,
and then they have to balance the needs of the
company themselves across the board. It seems like, whether it's
a written rule or not, they tell you do not
hang up on a customer. You have to listen tom
listen to them, you know, speak their piece basically on it. So,
if you think about it from the respective of the company,
(11:01):
customer services really important, right. It's one of the only
times when you, as a customer, are probably directly going
to be talking to someone who you know, for all
intents and purposes, you assume is literally representing their brand.
So to many of these companies, their brand is extremely important.
(11:23):
They want you to walk away feeling like you've had
a problem resolved. Yes, as you said, these are people
who if you're calling with an issue, it means you
have an issue, so you're probably pretty angry, and so
to make sure that that happens and to make sure
that they feel like the customer service representatives are presenting
them in the best way, they need to maintain pretty
(11:45):
strict control. And a lot of what we found in
our reporting was that it gets really, really, really specific.
So for some of these companies, they're really monitoring down
to the number of seconds that the call goes silent.
It's a metric called no talking time, where it's like
down I think in one case to the seventh decimal point,
(12:08):
just making sure that the agents is it's like a
quality control mechanism for them. But when you're looking at
these as performance metrics or something that's grading how well
the customer service agents is living up to what the
company expects, it can be really rigid, really strict, and
really scary. Okay, so let's get into some examples, because
(12:30):
some of these are pretty amazing. And as we mentioned,
you spoke to a ton of different people and these
are just some really representative examples of what a lot
of them go through. And we'll start off with your
first example, someone named Christine Stewart. She was taking calls
and chats for into It and Turbo Tax, and this
kind of illustrates the strict monitoring and threats to be fired.
You know, if you call out or something right away,
(12:51):
they're telling you, well, you might be fired, and some
of the other strict stuff, no outside noise. This is
kind of her experience. Yeah, Christine, she work for Turbo Tax,
and I think the most striking part of her story
to me, she was also a mom and she specifically
wanted this job because she had two kids at home
and she just needed to be there to get them
(13:13):
on the bus every day. And she said it took
five minutes, but it was really problematic to be taking
that kind of five minute break. And one day her
son comes home and he's like knocking on the door
because he's broken his wrist, and she feels so much
pressure to you know, not call in sick, not call
in for an emergency, that she like really has to
(13:37):
go to great lengths to try to convince everyone that
she can't work because her internet is out, and so
she really does feel like she's had this job specifically
because she wants to be home with her kids. Her
son breaks his wrist and she feels like she can't
take care of him, So I should say it's important
to know that in all of this reporting, we also
(13:59):
went to the companies, and we went to both the
company who these agents are taking calls for and the
contractors who they for the most part work for. UM
And I say for the most part, because there's a
bunch of different employment models here and most of them
said that they don't have a no hang up policy.
But from what we understood from talking to a number
(14:21):
of agents is that even if there's no written policy,
it seems to be the understanding among agents, among trainers,
and among the people who are actually doing these jobs
like it's really the lived reality. I mean, yeah, across
the board, it seemed like that's what everybody was feeling.
And also to back that up, you know, you guys
went through a lot of ways to verify a lot
(14:42):
of these details, where you could Facebook screenshots, email exchanges,
a lot of different things that these people would share
with you just to kind of verify their stories. So
that's pretty bad. One of the other running themes, obviously
is the verbal abuse too. Obviously, as we mentioned, people
are calling in with problems they get if they feel
like they're not getting help. You know, they can get
pretty testy in and the verbal abuse comes. You talked
(15:03):
about an agent who's taking calls for Bath and body
Works and she was getting it from a lot of customers,
are a lot of consumers, so her work with Bath
and body Works, she was very limited in what she
was able to kind of do on some of these
customers behalf and they would be say, running a promotion
like you can get two lotions for the price of one,
(15:25):
and she had to stick really closely to whatever the
policy said. And when she would repeat that, when she
would say that, a lot of customers and she told us,
would basically screen at her. And you know, it's like
their frustration with the company ended up coming out as
their frustration to her of her. Yeah, and and as
(15:46):
I mentioned, the verbal abuse can get pretty bad. You know,
they can get you know, until racial epithets, all sorts
of stuff that they have to deal with. And you know,
as we keep kind of reiterating there, there's this unspoken
no hangup rule, so you just have to kind of
take it until they either put or out or something.
One of the other interesting things is uh an agent
that was taken calls for Home depot, and I guess
(16:07):
in that one. As you mentioned, there's different business models,
they had to absorb some startup costs, even of you
know whatever, buying your computer, buying some equipment, just so
you can start that job. Yes, so this agent was
taking calls through a contractor called Arise Virtual Solutions. And
what Rise the Virtual Solutions have done is they've basically
(16:28):
taken the gig economy models like you'd see an uber
or lift, where they pretty much frame it as like
you are your own boss, you have your own company,
but will let you use our platform to be able
to take customer service calls. So that all sounds quite
complicated and it is, but in reality, what it boils
(16:51):
down to is that an agent who signs up to
be an Arise agent pays for all of their own training,
they pay for all of their own equipment, They have
a platform see deducted from every paycheck. And while there
are some agents who managed to make money out of this,
we've actually talked to quite a few Arise agents who
(17:14):
actually lost money on the deal or significant chunks of
their paycheck to the point where they were making below
minimum wage. Yes, some spend as much as a thousand
dollars on training and equipment, and I mean for somebody
that needs a job. You know, you're hoping that it
pays off in the long run, but that's a pretty
high number just coming in, you know, just the start,
and that's pretty tough. I mean, again, from the perspective
(17:37):
of the companies here, if the agents are the one
picking up those costs like paying for training, paying for equipment,
that means the company doesn't have to pay for those things.
It also means they don't have to pay for normal
employment costs like benefits, so they don't have to feel
the health insurance costs, they don't have to pay for
payroll taxes. It's cheaper for both arise the contract extor,
(18:00):
which lets them in turn offer a lower premium to
the brands they're trying to get to hire them. As
you mentioned, you've reached out to a lot of these
companies to get their response on you know what some
of their employees have been saying overall, what are they
saying about some of these pretty harsh conditions that we
hear about. So most of the contractors say they want
(18:23):
the working experience to be good for the agents. They say,
you know, we're trying our best. Most of the companies
who are fielding these calls, they, you know, something pretty similar.
A couple of them say, look, we're not the employers here,
it's on the contractor, like you know, it's their responsibility,
not ours, which of course makes them say, we're not
(18:44):
responsible for these things. A number of the companies didn't
get back to us, including Psychs, the company that Christine
Stewart at the agent we were talking about before with
the Sun who broke his wrist. They didn't get back
to us, they didn't provide any sort of comment. And
a few of the other companies we name any other brands,
they didn't give us any comment. Wow. Well, I mean,
(19:05):
it's just an interesting story. There's a lot of examples here.
I suggest everybody go and check out Ariana's piece on
this because there's some pretty interesting stuff, things that kind
of piss you off when you hear about it too so,
and you know, I guess if you're calling in with
a complaint somewhere, take a deep breath before you get
racked with people. Arianna Tobin, reporter at pro PUBLICA, thank
(19:26):
you very much for joining us, Thanks for having me.
Please be kind to your customer service agents. They're trying.
That's it for today. Join us on social media at
Daily Dive, pond on both Twitter and Instagram, Leave us
a comment, give us a rating, and tell us the
(19:47):
stories that you're interested in. Follow us on our Heart Radio,
or subscribe wherever you get your podcast. This episode of
The Daily Divers produced by vig Right and engineered by
Tony Sarantina. Hi'm oscar Mere and this was her Daily
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