from the book i-Land – A double Irish and a Dutch
Tuesday morning Avoka took the bus towards East Point. She got off the arena bus stop and walked along the busy port road, passing the Yahoo building, and carried on till she arrived at the business park. She had to wait at the reception. Another girl with long dark hair was already sitting there. This was Prima, the girl Avoka had previously talked with, as the agency guy had introduced both girls to each other, explaining they would start together. Avoka said hello and they started talking about how the weekend was and where they came from.
The door opened and a guy with black hair in jeans and blue jumper, not really tall, came up to the girls. “Hey, I’m Carver; you are the new staff, Prima and Avoka?”
The two girls answered with yes. Carver asked, “Do you already have a company ID card?” The two girls shake their heads.
Of course, they had not been given a company ID card yet. Carver replied, “Yes, that’s what I thought. Then we have to go to the Freeman house now; they will take pictures for making a corporate card like mine and you will get a temporary card which will be valid until the end of this week.” The security guy at Freeman house takes some photographs.
Prima quickly takes off her jacket, brushing her hair, and puts on some red lipstick while Avoka simply flashed a smile at the camera with her from the wind tousled hair. Carver rushes, “We have to go back; we have to be present for the 10 o’clock online introduction. This takes place only once a week, otherwise, you are not allowed to be in the department.”
The three rush back and right on time, the three are sitting in front of their Macbooks in room Bluemoon, the name of the meeting room. On their screen appear three girls sitting and waiting in a meeting room, discussing how stressing this day is, and talking about how stupid their users are, totally unaware that probably from every guru office around the world at least one person is following their conversation on screen. Carver explains, “They have this every week; all new staff from around the world have to follow this procedure and introduce themselves here online. I had that too when I started this job two months, ago.” Avoka replies, “Oh, that’s great, so where have you worked before?” Carver says, “I previously worked at Sony for the Vaio series. First I had started in the customer support and moved up to team-leader.”
Avoka replies, “Oh, the Vaio, I had one of those, too.”
It takes about ten more minutes and the screen switches. A girl appears in another room on the screen introducing herself. “Hello my name is Marta, I’m the recruiting coordinator, this is our weekly world-wide introduction, with all new staff world-wide that started this week. I will give you a presentation about the basics about our company and I want each of you to introduce yourself with your name and your role here in the company. So, then we can start.”
The next screen appeared starting from the east Croatia, Poland, London, Barcelona, France, Denmark, Brazil, USA and on and on around the world, followed by the presentation which started with the question, “What was the most searched word on the Internet today?”
Thirty minutes later the introduction is finished. Carver brings the two girls downstairs in another conference room. “So here you can do your self-study with these presentations and videos that you can watch and go through the Ad Academy. So, for the next three days you will have self-study and on Friday starts your two weeks in class training. Carver also showed the kitchen and coffee machine which was all well prepared with snacks, fresh fruits, cornflakes, juices, Coke cans and more sweets.
The two girls start watching the first videos. At one o’clock Carver comes down, “We are having a lunch break now, so if you want to join us?” They all walking to a nearby kiosk, buying some sandwiches and walking back to the first floor, where they all are having lunch together in the cafeteria.
Carver introduces Mario, a 25-year old, a much overweight guy from the Italian Team who will do the in-class training. He looks up, making a joke, and starts laughing while sounding like a Bart Simpson version. The guy at the window, a Spanish guy, looks up in the air, rolling his eyes, looking over to Avoka, and shakes his head. This was Herman, who originally was a programmer and who often bit his tongue to stay calm. The guy sitting opposite Prima, a French guy called George, laughs out loud then turns towards Carver asking, “When is Josh back? I get his cases, but I don’t want to do them, then I get so many negative customer reviews.”
Carver replied, “Why do you get his queries? Don’t answer them. I will pass them on to the guys in Germany, then they get the negative customer stats. I will give you some from the Italian team, so we all have the same number of e-mails for all teams and everything looks nice and even.” George nodding.
“Oh, good, the Italians always give good reviews.” Mario laughs again in his Bart Simpson laughing.
Another guy from the Italian team joins the conversation, “Yes, the Italian customers are good, not like the Germans, who always complain about everything that we can’t change. Our customers are much more understanding and it is fun replying to them.”
Prima brings in, “Oh, that’s good for me. I will work with the Italian team.”
Carver says, “Yes, that’s good for you. The Germans are difficult; it’s good to get rid of them. Let the other team bother with it, not us, then we have better customer stats. Patrick is starting giving us percentage goals to achieve 90% customer stats.” Avoka takes a deep breath, she couldn’t believe what kind of conversation this was, asking herself why did she even expect anything else? This was just another one of those customer service centers as they were typical here in Ireland. Okay, this division explicitly was much more relaxed than other call centers, but the nature of it was the same, and of course they would work to the same principles as all others like Apple, Yahoo, and Amazon, who were all known for their ridiculous goal setting and personnel strategies, whereas here it seemed like a kindergarten for big kids who could play within their playpen and were well fed with sweets, free drinks and plenty of “game” time. It reminded Avoka of her breaks in earlier jobs when they would hand out those popular “surprise eggs” that contained little construction games for kids to be built together with the favorite slogan “surprise – excitement – fun”. And when the kids couldn’t build the job together they would run to their mama or papa and they do it for them.
Right after lunch they had a so-called “shadowing session”, which meant they would sit next to one of the “Analysts”, watching them answering or handling the customer queries. And yes, the way they handled the customer queries followed exactly that surprise egg principle. Mario was checking every possibility if the client had made any mistake that would be against the customer policy. While they meanwhile had found out what the customer’s real problem was, he chose to reply the customer what he did wrong that would not be in line with the customer policy and there was nothing he could do for him.
Avoka looked at Prima, who only flashed a smile then asked for a cigarette break. Avoka moved on to shadow Roberto, another guy from the Italian team, who was sitting quietly at the window. Roberto was explaining that he was waiting on a response mail from India. Roberto said, “We always have to send our emails that we send out to the clients to India. They check our answers and most often they make some silly changes like we have to answer more politely or something of that kind before we can finally send the response to the client.” Avoka looked with big rolling eyes at Roberto.
He flashed a grinning smile, “Yes, and when it’s an A ranked customer the Indian answer has to be sent to the key account manager in the country and then passed on to the client. And for each email, we send, we have to fill this form here, with all these questions to be answered.” Avoka stared at the form, which was asking questions like ‘What is the customer’s problem’, ‘what is the resolution’, ‘was his question solved’, did you acknowledge’, ‘assure the client’, ‘did you pick the client up’ and so on. The answer also had to be copied and certain points, were copy-pasted about three times in the same document.
Roberto said, “Ah, here this is the answer we have to send to the customer, now.” The Indian guy’s head appeared in the little chat window with an “Ok, but make these changes.”
Roberto now reads out loud the final answer, “Dear Joey, we are aware of the reporting figures not matching your count and can understand your confusion, I would wonder the same. This issue is well known and our engineering team is well aware of the problem but unfortunately, at this point, we can provide only the given metrics. We will inform you on future options as soon as they become available. I hope this answer will help you…”
Roberto smiles at Avoka. “Yes, this is the answer that had to go through India and the country’s account manager and that’s the way they want it to be written.” Avoka took a deep breath then sat back on the chair thinking, Wow, that’s going to be the job here, and they do like 3-5 emails of that kind for a day, that’s the job!
Prima returned from her cigarette break. Carver came up, “Okay girls, you can go downstairs now, starting your afternoon self- study class. I will come down later on before you can leave.”
The two girls went down, starting the digital academy session. Prima was even more impressed than Avoka was but for her, the whole topics were new as originally, she worked as a translator. But Carver had decided that she should become an Analyst, despite she had no background in Internet, ad-serving, search engines or any other technical or programming background. Avoka felt somehow like watching the totally, wrong movie. But it seemed that’s the way they worked it.
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Salsa and Valentine’s Day in Dublin
In the evening Avoka went to a Salsa class at the River Bar…..
To be continued….
Natalie Hush 