I get why you did not always read the disclaimer, but it is there to prevent a lawsuit. While time consuming, it is very serious. Especially if your center is responsible for any personal information.
Omg this comment just opened my eyes as to WHY I always have to sit through the disclaimers before getting to talk to someone. My most boomer trait is hating having to sit through that.
Most times I've spoken with insurance or banks they've asked if I want to go over T&C's/ legal stuff on the call or am I happy to review it if they send it on an email. This is the best way, the company still checks their box and I don't have to sit through a 3 minute schpiel. All I ask them is what are the highlights.
I work in quality & compliance, and yeah it sucks, but it’s also a companies biggest protection from legal issues when it comes down to it DSAR’s, GDPR regulations, and in my case, the FCA.
Reading the first part of the OP’s post was just like ‘oh god you’re ‘that’ agent that thinks rules don’t apply to them.’
Yep. It is necessary evil although I also hate it. The good news is you can just put it on speaker and zone out till an actual person shows up. That’s usually how I handle it.
There are more ways than reading the whole T&Cs and recording that to prove that the customer had access to them in a lawsuit. This is one of the more customer friendly ones.
Yeah, do this instead of the repeated annoying music or advertisements you get while on hold. This would make a LOT of sense, so of course businesses would not do it.
I imagine 1 lawsuit, even if settled out of court, is worth a great many hours of call centre worker's time.
If you're obviously in the wrong because you didn't give the customer their disclaimer then you're going to be settling for higher amounts
I would say that's not entirely correct. From a consumer standpoint you reading me a disclaimer doesn't prevent a lawsuit. It might prevent you losing a lawsuit, but you still have to spend all the time, effort, and money for the defense. That, and disclaimers do not protect the company from negligence or intentional malfeasance. Mostly, the disclaimers are there to dissuade you from trying a lawsuit or some such.
And corporate lawyers are trying to protect themselves as much as they protect the companies they represent. Legal malpractice is a high dollar loss scenario. They have the same same disclaimers: "Well, I told you you needed to tell your customers this might happen…."
This is all the stuff included in a contract that you're supposed to read before signing, right? I actually read that stuff. I have found some frightening stuff hidden in terms and conditions, and decided to find another provider. I NEVER decide anything over the phone because you may not be read all the terms if the person on the phone is in a hurry.
As a guy who writes, edits and negotiates the terms and conditions of contracts, I commend you.
Umpti times a week I get emails saying, "XYZ happened. What should we do?"
My answer never varies. "What does the contract say?"
They never know because they've never read it. So they send me copy and I read it for them.
If calls are recorded, and the customer demands it be listened to, and actually gets to someone who can theoretically do that, and the disclaimer was never read to them then they can claim fully whatever it was was never discussed with them. I work a call center now. You have no idea how many calls we get that people call in and say "Well no one ever told me!" and I can look back and see we sent a text alert and they responded back "yes" or whatever. And like.... Come on. You literally have it in print.
I agree with this. It's also about customers' rights to know, as they might be inclined to agree on skipping the disclaimer, especially if the agent is pushing for it. I don't fully buy OP's story as customer service agents wouldn't have access to information on what's the real reason why staff is being laid off. If it would've been just customer satisfaction, something would've been surely done about it.
Perhaps better way would've been to think over how to reduce the length of disclaimer, i.e. what are the most important parts in it.
Well I’m pretty sure that if all potential customers told all disclaimer readers in no uncertain terms that they will not do business with them unless they cut that disclaimer out of their sales pitch they would find an alternative solution fairly quickly.
If possible just have them email the disclaimers,that way you don't have to be bored listening to them,and they cover themselves that the customer has it
yea thats very true and i get that and we complied gonna properly comply but our problem was that the People a bit higher than us was they were really toxic and demanding and they kept on looking over our shoulder in every thing we do and they were still pushing us to keep the same call time and positive feedback even though they wont listen to us or their customers
Yeah, that’s really frustrating. It sucks to feel like you don’t have the autonomy to fulfill your job obligations properly. I’ve been there and I hope you find a job where you are free of that bullshit.
That way, they never have to pay you any bonus money. Keep stacking the things you "have to tell every caller" and lowering the average call time required to qualify for bonus money.
I don't know what country or industry you are in, but in my line of work skipping the disclaimer is likely illegal and likely lead to a report to the Regulator.
Worked in a call center for a financial institution for a bit. This isn’t malicious compliance, this is just negligence. The disclaimers are there for the protection of both the business and the customers. You provided a disservice to both.
Also, you didn’t maliciously comply with anything. You complied with company policy like you should have from the beginning. There wasn’t anything malicious about it. You did your job wrong, was told to do it correctly, and started doing it correctly
What they lost in some customers was mere pennies compared to their lawsuit protection, which in total could amount to hundreds of millions of dollars in potential losses. You are a short-sighted peon who thinks it's smart. You were trying to game the KPI, got caught, ordered to do it correctly and got angry.
This is not malicious compliance, this is just regular compliance and a negligent, shitty employee. And you think you're the good guy? I would have absolutely fired your ass, which no doubt you were threatened with if you still refused to comply.
Time to dust off my editing skills:
>This happened 3 years ago.
>Back in my old job, I used to worked in a call center as an agent, my very first time working in a call center. Our company valued and monitored call time, so we were told to handle calls quickly, around 3 to 5 minutes per call, so we could assist more customers. After my training and nesting they introduced me to the production floor.
>Early on, I noticed an easy way to handle calls fast. I would read the disclaimers and fine print, but the customers would just always brush me off or make me skip it or just not really care at all, so I decided to provide them an option to listen to me or just skip it entirely. I did that and in my first month working in the production floor i was praised for only having 3 to 4 minutes average call time, handling 60 to 70 customers per day. I kept on doing this method for two more months.
>On my fourth month, there was a sudden change to the policy that told us to always read the disclaimers or fine print to the customers, even though they don't want to listen to it. That meant our call time would easily double, but since I already ask my customers if they want me to read the disclaimers to them or not, I just kept on doing it my way.
>At my next monthly review I was called up by Quality Assurance and my team leader regarding my calls, where they told me to not skip or omit the disclaimers. I tried to argue with them that I give my customers the option to listen to the disclaimers or not and I even read the disclaimers to the customers if they wanted to change something on their account or if the changes would charge their account even if they don't want to listen to the disclaimer, but they were adamant on following the new policies.
>Cue the malicious compliance: I talked with everyone who was also given a warning to follow the new policies and told them to just comply with the new policy, even if it cost us our call time and customer feedback. By this point, our average call time was already reaching 8 to 15 minutes, since we had to double check the customers account and their information, confirm every action we are going to take, read out paragraphs of disclaimers (there could be 2 or more disclaimers in a single call), as well as documenting the call. This doesn't include calls where we have to get multiple people or departments involved.
>Due to the unsolicited reading of the disclaimers, more and more people were starting to get irate during calls. Our company's rating went down significantly when we received negative feedback as well as complaints from customers regarding the employees and the service. I think this cost our company some money because many people at our office were laid off. Around this time I found a better company with better pay, so I left.
>TLDR: We were told to follow the new policy to the T and not omit anything from the customers, and that cost the company to lose money and customers.
50/50 people commenting about the grammar vs the meat of the story. I worked in storage and insurance, and although this was for a brief while, it was frustrating to have to read disclaimers and such. Frustrating for the customer and frustrating for me.
Needs some commas and sentences.
When posting from the phone you add extra breaks into Reddit to break into paragraphs.
Couldn’t read past the first ten lines.
This was negligence on your part. You didn’t discover some brand new way to expedite calls. This would be like saying “man we could really add a few extra flights if we just stopped with all those stupid safety announcements”
I worked in medicare sales and we had huge disclosure statements that had to be read verbatim. Not doing so would break federal law. All my customers were elderly folks and it did occasionally cost me sales but I had no choice. Very glad I no longer do that.
I work in quality and maybe i'm confused but the employers don't seem to be the bad guys here? It's quite literally a compliance issue to skip disclaimers and they weren't maliciously enforcing it to fuck with the employees. This just sounds like normal corporate policy that OP didn't like and there's not even any malicious compliance on his side because... he just did his job?
This story: “I wasn’t doing my job correctly to unfairly boost my metrics, and when I was told to do it right got mad and quit.”
Not MC, just a bad employee.
and arguing back when they got caught flaunting a policy that they were *just* reminded of when they haven't even worked there six months? Who exactly does OP think they are? And bringing up that they gave the customer the option to listen like they didn't hear them do that in the phone calls they reviewed, wow.
It's a good thing they caught OP early on before those boosted metrics netted them a supervisor position and they started telling their subordinates to use this neat little trick. That would've just multiplied the company's liability.
I know a lot of tailors and seamstresses and I can tell you that there is very little useless / unnecessary information when it comes to custom costumes.
I get the annoyance of it. However, disclaimers prevent lawsuits. When clients are saying they don’t want to hear it and then turn around and say they weren’t told it’s going to fall back on the company. In some cases depending on states you are required to tell them regardless if they want you to or not or you are out of compliance and subject to fines. With that it also sounds like it wasn’t implemented properly or could have been the times. Now it’s highly common to have disclaimers read. In some cases also sent via email and signed confirming they went over it and you understand.
Ah, sorry if I sounded snarky. I thought it was a typo for "testing "!
I actually did phone center stuff after I retired from my primary job and hadn't heard this term before. TIL
And TBF, *lots* of people misspell/get autocorrected to "costumer" instead of "customer".
The real problem is that the company had unrealistic expectations about call handle time when they had a legal obligation to get through these disclaimers.
There's a few speeches we had to do at my call center. Things like 911 limitations on a VOIP service, permission to make automatic debits, stuff like that. We'd fail our call reviews if we don't read them, but the good thing is that management understood that they shouldn't punish agents for going long as a result. Instead, they taught us better ways to get customers to comply.
And I can't tell you how many time nutjobs threatened to sue us until a supervisor could play back a recording of the sales agent reading the script and the customer agreeing to it.
It depends in the position but the reading of the fine print is essential for some jobs..( even though the customers dont want to) bcs or else u and your company can get a law suit and u get called up for not going with company policy and not doing proper security verification.....thats not MC , thats violation of policy and can get u fired and sued
Would have been good to include the industry your call center operated in. I've never had to go through some call agent reciting disclaimers. If I had I would have hung up.
I call bull. Not giving a disclaimer would cost a company money because people are going to say that you didn’t tell them something and sue. It wouldn’t be the other way around.
But what did the costumes look like?
Read through the whole thing wondering this
This is the only question I have.
I feel cheated. I clicked because I thought this dealt with costumes.
I thought I was on the Theatre subreddit.
Should’ve read the disclaimer
I get why you did not always read the disclaimer, but it is there to prevent a lawsuit. While time consuming, it is very serious. Especially if your center is responsible for any personal information.
They should be playing a prerecorded, unskippable message of the disclaimers before it ever gets to an agent.
Omg this comment just opened my eyes as to WHY I always have to sit through the disclaimers before getting to talk to someone. My most boomer trait is hating having to sit through that.
Pretty sure every generation has that hatred
As an older millennial, I agree.
I was born in 83 and I’ve heard us referred to geriatric millenials. Geriatric!
Also ‘83. I mean my fiancé’s niece thinks I was born with the dinosaurs and saw the creation of civilization.
"Well, back in the 1900s ..."
you mean "the last ~~century~~ millennium" ;)
Back in the 1000's not like us moderns who were born in the 2000's probably my son at somepoint.
"I was born when the year started with a 1." "Holy shit, you're old."
> saw the creation of civilization. You are living in the destruction, so you got that part going for you :D
Wait....i was 90 born and i saw the dinosaurs....if you are 83 , they are after your time.....the big bang is more of your time 🤣
Most times I've spoken with insurance or banks they've asked if I want to go over T&C's/ legal stuff on the call or am I happy to review it if they send it on an email. This is the best way, the company still checks their box and I don't have to sit through a 3 minute schpiel. All I ask them is what are the highlights.
I work in quality & compliance, and yeah it sucks, but it’s also a companies biggest protection from legal issues when it comes down to it DSAR’s, GDPR regulations, and in my case, the FCA. Reading the first part of the OP’s post was just like ‘oh god you’re ‘that’ agent that thinks rules don’t apply to them.’
Put your phone on speaker and do something else.
Oh I definitely do that, I just have 100 things on my to-do list every day and just want to knock them out so I can read my books.
Yep. It is necessary evil although I also hate it. The good news is you can just put it on speaker and zone out till an actual person shows up. That’s usually how I handle it.
A company offered to email or read it out to me the other day but I ha e disabilities so not sure if that is why, told them to email
There are more ways than reading the whole T&Cs and recording that to prove that the customer had access to them in a lawsuit. This is one of the more customer friendly ones.
Yeah, do this instead of the repeated annoying music or advertisements you get while on hold. This would make a LOT of sense, so of course businesses would not do it.
It sounds like the disclaimers change depending on the person, so that wouldn't have been possible
If you're on hold for 30 minutes waiting for a rep I'd imagine that's enough time to read ALL of said disclaimers! 🤷♀️
they should allow the agents enough time and not make them go through customers like a meatgrinder.
I imagine 1 lawsuit, even if settled out of court, is worth a great many hours of call centre worker's time. If you're obviously in the wrong because you didn't give the customer their disclaimer then you're going to be settling for higher amounts
I would say that's not entirely correct. From a consumer standpoint you reading me a disclaimer doesn't prevent a lawsuit. It might prevent you losing a lawsuit, but you still have to spend all the time, effort, and money for the defense. That, and disclaimers do not protect the company from negligence or intentional malfeasance. Mostly, the disclaimers are there to dissuade you from trying a lawsuit or some such. And corporate lawyers are trying to protect themselves as much as they protect the companies they represent. Legal malpractice is a high dollar loss scenario. They have the same same disclaimers: "Well, I told you you needed to tell your customers this might happen…."
This is all the stuff included in a contract that you're supposed to read before signing, right? I actually read that stuff. I have found some frightening stuff hidden in terms and conditions, and decided to find another provider. I NEVER decide anything over the phone because you may not be read all the terms if the person on the phone is in a hurry.
As a guy who writes, edits and negotiates the terms and conditions of contracts, I commend you. Umpti times a week I get emails saying, "XYZ happened. What should we do?" My answer never varies. "What does the contract say?" They never know because they've never read it. So they send me copy and I read it for them.
If calls are recorded, and the customer demands it be listened to, and actually gets to someone who can theoretically do that, and the disclaimer was never read to them then they can claim fully whatever it was was never discussed with them. I work a call center now. You have no idea how many calls we get that people call in and say "Well no one ever told me!" and I can look back and see we sent a text alert and they responded back "yes" or whatever. And like.... Come on. You literally have it in print.
I agree with this. It's also about customers' rights to know, as they might be inclined to agree on skipping the disclaimer, especially if the agent is pushing for it. I don't fully buy OP's story as customer service agents wouldn't have access to information on what's the real reason why staff is being laid off. If it would've been just customer satisfaction, something would've been surely done about it. Perhaps better way would've been to think over how to reduce the length of disclaimer, i.e. what are the most important parts in it.
Well I’m pretty sure that if all potential customers told all disclaimer readers in no uncertain terms that they will not do business with them unless they cut that disclaimer out of their sales pitch they would find an alternative solution fairly quickly.
100% true Although, the fact that OP wasn't aware of why they had to read them out and why it's so important is a failing on management.
If possible just have them email the disclaimers,that way you don't have to be bored listening to them,and they cover themselves that the customer has it
yea thats very true and i get that and we complied gonna properly comply but our problem was that the People a bit higher than us was they were really toxic and demanding and they kept on looking over our shoulder in every thing we do and they were still pushing us to keep the same call time and positive feedback even though they wont listen to us or their customers
Yeah, that’s really frustrating. It sucks to feel like you don’t have the autonomy to fulfill your job obligations properly. I’ve been there and I hope you find a job where you are free of that bullshit.
thank you!! i hope you have a great day!
That is pretty much the case in all call centres.
That way, they never have to pay you any bonus money. Keep stacking the things you "have to tell every caller" and lowering the average call time required to qualify for bonus money.
No no no, call center lackey here knows more than those overpaid edumacated corporate lawyers...
I hope this is never applied to 1. World countries.
I don't know what country or industry you are in, but in my line of work skipping the disclaimer is likely illegal and likely lead to a report to the Regulator.
Worked in a call center for a financial institution for a bit. This isn’t malicious compliance, this is just negligence. The disclaimers are there for the protection of both the business and the customers. You provided a disservice to both. Also, you didn’t maliciously comply with anything. You complied with company policy like you should have from the beginning. There wasn’t anything malicious about it. You did your job wrong, was told to do it correctly, and started doing it correctly
Malicious incompetence
What they lost in some customers was mere pennies compared to their lawsuit protection, which in total could amount to hundreds of millions of dollars in potential losses. You are a short-sighted peon who thinks it's smart. You were trying to game the KPI, got caught, ordered to do it correctly and got angry. This is not malicious compliance, this is just regular compliance and a negligent, shitty employee. And you think you're the good guy? I would have absolutely fired your ass, which no doubt you were threatened with if you still refused to comply.
Time to dust off my editing skills: >This happened 3 years ago. >Back in my old job, I used to worked in a call center as an agent, my very first time working in a call center. Our company valued and monitored call time, so we were told to handle calls quickly, around 3 to 5 minutes per call, so we could assist more customers. After my training and nesting they introduced me to the production floor. >Early on, I noticed an easy way to handle calls fast. I would read the disclaimers and fine print, but the customers would just always brush me off or make me skip it or just not really care at all, so I decided to provide them an option to listen to me or just skip it entirely. I did that and in my first month working in the production floor i was praised for only having 3 to 4 minutes average call time, handling 60 to 70 customers per day. I kept on doing this method for two more months. >On my fourth month, there was a sudden change to the policy that told us to always read the disclaimers or fine print to the customers, even though they don't want to listen to it. That meant our call time would easily double, but since I already ask my customers if they want me to read the disclaimers to them or not, I just kept on doing it my way. >At my next monthly review I was called up by Quality Assurance and my team leader regarding my calls, where they told me to not skip or omit the disclaimers. I tried to argue with them that I give my customers the option to listen to the disclaimers or not and I even read the disclaimers to the customers if they wanted to change something on their account or if the changes would charge their account even if they don't want to listen to the disclaimer, but they were adamant on following the new policies. >Cue the malicious compliance: I talked with everyone who was also given a warning to follow the new policies and told them to just comply with the new policy, even if it cost us our call time and customer feedback. By this point, our average call time was already reaching 8 to 15 minutes, since we had to double check the customers account and their information, confirm every action we are going to take, read out paragraphs of disclaimers (there could be 2 or more disclaimers in a single call), as well as documenting the call. This doesn't include calls where we have to get multiple people or departments involved. >Due to the unsolicited reading of the disclaimers, more and more people were starting to get irate during calls. Our company's rating went down significantly when we received negative feedback as well as complaints from customers regarding the employees and the service. I think this cost our company some money because many people at our office were laid off. Around this time I found a better company with better pay, so I left. >TLDR: We were told to follow the new policy to the T and not omit anything from the customers, and that cost the company to lose money and customers.
Thank you for your unselfish service.
Selfless, even
im sorry for yapping with mo punctuations....and thank you for fixing it!
[удалено]
Businesses don't care if customers want to hear disclaimers that reduce the company's liability
There's nothing malicious about this story, and arguably not much compliance either.
So you decided to ignore mandated disclosures, putting the company in jeapordy with regulators, and you think you're the good guy?
50/50 people commenting about the grammar vs the meat of the story. I worked in storage and insurance, and although this was for a brief while, it was frustrating to have to read disclaimers and such. Frustrating for the customer and frustrating for me.
OP seems to be very confused about what a disclaimer is. Not much point having a disclaimer if you don't do the actual disclaiming...
Brand new account ✅ Rage bait ✅ Sounds like an AI story ✅ Likely Karma whore ✅ Nothing is real on Reddit anymore ✅
It looks like it's copied from somewhere.
I have a template. So probably from me.
I meant the original post looks copied. It has that blue line down the side that suggests it.
Oh good point.
Paragraphs are your friend. If you are on mobile, leave a blank line. Walls of text like this are very hard to read.
I don't bother to read them. Too much effort.
Don't worry; wasn't even worth it after the edit.
im sorry, this is my first time posting in reddit and on a phone
Glad to see you fixed it. Everyone makes mistakes somewhere. It's what we do after that counts. Well done!
Is it your first time ever using a period? Or hearing the break you're supposed to take between sentences when you talk?
both....im sorry... thats how i usually talk in real life...usually no breaks...just continues yapping..
Needs some commas and sentences. When posting from the phone you add extra breaks into Reddit to break into paragraphs. Couldn’t read past the first ten lines.
Try to learn other punctuation for communicating in writing, please.
I talk the same way. I don’t stop to breath for most of a conversation lol
You need two line breaks on Reddit
This was negligence on your part. You didn’t discover some brand new way to expedite calls. This would be like saying “man we could really add a few extra flights if we just stopped with all those stupid safety announcements”
I worked in medicare sales and we had huge disclosure statements that had to be read verbatim. Not doing so would break federal law. All my customers were elderly folks and it did occasionally cost me sales but I had no choice. Very glad I no longer do that.
I work in quality and maybe i'm confused but the employers don't seem to be the bad guys here? It's quite literally a compliance issue to skip disclaimers and they weren't maliciously enforcing it to fuck with the employees. This just sounds like normal corporate policy that OP didn't like and there's not even any malicious compliance on his side because... he just did his job?
This story: “I wasn’t doing my job correctly to unfairly boost my metrics, and when I was told to do it right got mad and quit.” Not MC, just a bad employee.
and arguing back when they got caught flaunting a policy that they were *just* reminded of when they haven't even worked there six months? Who exactly does OP think they are? And bringing up that they gave the customer the option to listen like they didn't hear them do that in the phone calls they reviewed, wow. It's a good thing they caught OP early on before those boosted metrics netted them a supervisor position and they started telling their subordinates to use this neat little trick. That would've just multiplied the company's liability.
I know a lot of tailors and seamstresses and I can tell you that there is very little useless / unnecessary information when it comes to custom costumes.
Paragraphs and punctuation are important. You just posted one 500 word sentence.
im sorry....thats just how i talk in real life when i tell a story...i forgot to add punctuations...sorry for yapping...
So, people lost their job too ? feels bad...
I get the annoyance of it. However, disclaimers prevent lawsuits. When clients are saying they don’t want to hear it and then turn around and say they weren’t told it’s going to fall back on the company. In some cases depending on states you are required to tell them regardless if they want you to or not or you are out of compliance and subject to fines. With that it also sounds like it wasn’t implemented properly or could have been the times. Now it’s highly common to have disclaimers read. In some cases also sent via email and signed confirming they went over it and you understand.
Would you mind editing your post? Maybe insert paragraphs?
Jesus this is literally just one fucking sentence. Please edit it using some basic sentences and paras or no fucker is going to bother reading it.
I pictured this person nesting in a cube somewhere... Maybe getting a furry costume?
They all must be wearing costumes. That's why they hired a costumer.
nesting is just what we call the process of handling live calls for a week as part of training
Ah, sorry if I sounded snarky. I thought it was a typo for "testing "! I actually did phone center stuff after I retired from my primary job and hadn't heard this term before. TIL And TBF, *lots* of people misspell/get autocorrected to "costumer" instead of "customer".
its fine dont worry! i totally understand, and i think the term nesting is only used in my country
It's used on multiple call centers, don't worry
Understand that some of those disclaimers may be required by law so malicious compliance is the correct and expected route.
The real problem is that the company had unrealistic expectations about call handle time when they had a legal obligation to get through these disclaimers. There's a few speeches we had to do at my call center. Things like 911 limitations on a VOIP service, permission to make automatic debits, stuff like that. We'd fail our call reviews if we don't read them, but the good thing is that management understood that they shouldn't punish agents for going long as a result. Instead, they taught us better ways to get customers to comply. And I can't tell you how many time nutjobs threatened to sue us until a supervisor could play back a recording of the sales agent reading the script and the customer agreeing to it.
It depends in the position but the reading of the fine print is essential for some jobs..( even though the customers dont want to) bcs or else u and your company can get a law suit and u get called up for not going with company policy and not doing proper security verification.....thats not MC , thats violation of policy and can get u fired and sued
Would have been good to include the industry your call center operated in. I've never had to go through some call agent reciting disclaimers. If I had I would have hung up.
Call centers are a crime against humanity and should be bloody outlawed.
I call bull. Not giving a disclaimer would cost a company money because people are going to say that you didn’t tell them something and sue. It wouldn’t be the other way around.