Working in the "gig" economy is a nice way of saying that you basically roam and seek employment for contract/temporary work and that you're a member of the "precariate" working class. In other words, you find work when you need to. You finish the job and then you move on to find other work. Basically, when you work in a failing economic system that doesn't meet the basic needs of those that work in it you'll hear very curious terms like "precariate" working class or "gig economy".
What this means is that the people that work in this system are being screwed by a very small but powerful and wealthy group of individuals that bascially control everything. With that out of the way (stated for context and to assist in driving home the point I'm going to make), I'll move to the topic at hand.
Asurion the cellphone insurance company. You may have had the displeasure of dealing with them if you've had an issue with your cellphone and needed to have it repaired or replaced if your phone carrier is Sprint, Verizon, etc. My experience comes from working at Sprint stores as a Technical Consultant via Asurion so that's the lense I'll be looking at this from. I'll be very honest about my observations that I've witnessed while working at these sites. Their customers don't really understand how insurance works for mobile devices (they do when it comes to cars or medical coverage), the Management is incompetent at best and their policies are very contradictory. There are ways of addressing issues that customers have that the Asurion Technicians are trained to handle a certain way that at times are ridiculous and frustrating for everyone involved. For example someone could have a cracked front display and come in to have it fixed. If it is repairable in store then it is repaired in store. If the parts are unavailable then it is mailed off to a repair facility for it to be repaired. However, if there is one other issue such as having a cracked camera lens while having a cracked front display then it is an automatic insurance claim. The Technicians are not authorized to touch the device. Recently this has changed slightly. My manager has filled me in about having a little more room for being flexible about customer filing insurance claims for certain issues. But I'll explain this to mirror how it was explained to me for the purpose of this blog.
If the device has liquid damage no matter how much nor how little, the customer must file an insurance claim with Asurion insurance. If the device is bent and there is anything that doesn't work or is failing with the device then it is an insurance claim. If the device has cracks on the back and the software glitches, insurance claim. It makes sense to most people that having liquid damage or a bent device (due to the fact that the logic boards/motherboard may be damaged) but having any two issues seems that are unrelated and that being an automatic insurance claim seems a little odd. If the speaker suddenly stops working and there are add pop ups, insurance claim. If the volume button isn't flush with the housing and battery doesn't hold a charge, insurance claim.
Of course, there are times when the customer is just being ridiculous and wants you to troubleshoot or repair an obviously hopeless device. "My internet stopped working suddenly two days ago", a customer told me once. The device's litmus papers were triggered (litmus papers are an easy indicator for liquid contact versus relying on visible corrosion in the device) and the device was so bent from the customer sitting on it, it was shaped more or less like a sickle.
In addition to all of this there are certain metrics that are evaluated for something called SPS. SPS is a bunch of various factors (which are very convoluted and makes no sense as to why it is counted) that Sprint has come up with to attempt to measure the quality of the service being provided. A part of this is from feedback from surveys after a repair or other technical service interaction has been made. This is where things get interesting.
The feedback from surveys may have nothing to do with the repair or technical service interaction but is still counted as part of this metric without any filtering out surveys that are expressly and obviously not about repair or technical service interactions. For example, a customer may have had connection issues due to them having a faulty SIM card installed in their device. The SIM card is then replaced with a working SIM card. A survey is triggered by this interaction. The customer scores a 4 (the scoring itself is interesting as well) and states that they scored the interaction as such due to the fact that Sprint doesn't have "talking while texting" features. Now that entire team is effected even though their frustration or disapproval has nothing to do with the interaction.
This being a survey, however, it is entirely subjective as well. A customer could have been extremetly rude, threaten other customers, staff, employees but it is strictly counted by the number given from that survey. The measurement scale itself reads something like (I am not exactly sure about this but I'll get to as accurate as I can remember) a 1-5 is a "Detractor", a 6-8 is neutral and 9-10 is what they call a "Promoter". Aside from the jargon that is used, no one that I've actually talked to yet, from typical employee to management, can actually make any real sense of how this is all calculated, whether this is accurate (I question how accurate a subjective survey response can be accurate about anything, especially when the people taking the survey are responding solely on how they feel how their experience was) or why it is measure in such manner.
If I don't know how to use all of the useful features of a mobile device such as using the back up features to back up contact numbers, etc. to the cloud and one day the device starts freezing/locking up, has battery or connection issues then decide it is in my best interest to take my device into a store to get technical service. I'll probably be upset if my information was lost (had a customer recently lose hundreds of contact information because she didn't know how to back up her information to the cloud) and may even blame technical support that my information was lost out of anger or frustration.
All in all I believe these metrics are used for upper management to hide incompetence within the upper eschelons of management. I have recently lost confidence in their ability to add anything of use to the company (be it Asurion or Sprint side of things) and will be looking to exit the company soon. To be honest, I look forward to the day that all technical based companies are ran by the workers in a worker cooperative, capitalist based economy versus a hierarchical capitalist based economy (I hope Spain and Italy paves the way for worker cooperative based companies to thrive and become the norm).
After my dealings with several large companies and the obvious incompetence that I have witnessed, I no longer believe that top-down capitalist systems work and have put my faith into the workers that actually do the work to run the companies successfully. You may not see it on television but some of these worker cooperatives are as old as some traditionally run companies and do much better at running the companies.
Enough of my rant about larger economic systems for today but I will update this blog as I encounter more information.
http://democracyatwork.info
http://rdwolff.com
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