From the beginning of the job until the day I quit, I kept track of my own statistics, just because it was something I liked doing. Number of calls, number of reached customers, number of sales.
A few weeks before I quit, they submitted me for retraining because my sales numbers were going down. Except they only looked at 3 months of data; anything older than that got trashed.
I pulled up all my data. Three years of data.
- I was making more calls per shift than my quota. And not by a small margin.
- In the time I had been there, the number of customers reached had gone down steadily, consistently.
- My ratio of reached-customers to sales-made was consistent across the entire period. For every (forget the exact number, but something like) five customers I spoke to, I made a sale.
Management denied my claims as false, accused me of faking the data. If they couldn't be bothered to keep track of more than 3 months, how likely was it that I had 3 years of real data?
I took the retraining. I sat through every class in the front row with a notebook and pen in front of me, and it stayed empty the entire time. I passed every quiz with a perfect score, I had the answer to every question asked.
By the end of the retraining, they asked how helpful I thought it was. I tore out the blank sheet of paper, "all my notes" and gave it to them.
I worked one week after the retraining ended. I had someone sit over my shoulder for the whole week.
They were aghast at how quickly I could navigate the customer profile, how quickly I could determine if someone was eligible for a call. The other callers took ~30 seconds to determine whether or not to call; I could do it in less than 10.
They were agog how quickly I could dial the phone. I can still do ten-key right side up and upside down pretty well.
They hated how I rewrote all their scripts. I made them flow better, made them easier to say, easier to understand, less excessively verbose. I took two or three paragraphs (seriously, for a fucking voicemail) and boiled it down to a couple of sentences, under a minute.
And in that week, I didn't speak to a single customer. The person supervising me literally told me "You're doing everything right, you just don't have luck."
They cut my hours.
Everybody outside management agreed it wasn't my fault I was missing my sales quota, but management insisted on blaming me anyway.
Three years of data...
Finally, one day, I pulled in to the parking lot, sat in my car, and cried. Then I called in to the office, and told them I was done. I walked in the customer entrance, left my key card at the front desk, and walked out.
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These days, I work in the tech industry, where my skills in data management and analytics have helped make my team more efficient. And nobody accuses me of fudging the data.
