(no subject)

[why_me_why_not]

We went to a Kiwanis Pancake Breakfast fundraiser thing this morning, and I ran into one of my friends from UHG. She's a very very sweet older lady, and I'm glad I got to see her. She was telling me about how bad things have gotten there, which I already knew but still sucks. But she did say something else that really made my day. When I was working there, especially when I was doing floor support, I always went out of my way to be sure that good agents got some type of recognition. We had some really excellent customer service reps, ones who actually cared about our members and committed to actually helping them. The supervisors basically ignored agents except to fuss about stats, and our quality agents - well, our quality department was outsourced to India, which I have issues with anyway just because it's a federal government program, and most of the quality agents speak English as a second language. Our reps from India that were doing correspondence I actually loved, because even though there were only a handful of them, they were quick and efficient, but correspondence was a lot of copy and paste. The quality agents use copy and paste too, but as a way to leave comments on evaluations. If the agents don't follow word-for-word and in-order the script that Quality has been given, they get deducted points. (some of it is so stupid. the two areas I always got dinged on were acknowledgment statements and email addresses. we were supposed to answer with "how may I help you" and after the caller states their issue make a statement like "I'll be happy to help you with that." But if a member first thing gives me their member number, I'd verify hipaa and pull the account up before asking again, something like "okay, I do have your information, what can I do for you today?" Instead, what they want us to do is tell the member something like "I'll be happy to verify your information and assist you, but first can I ask why you're calling?" and then you have no acct info, or if you do have the acct up you can't release anything because hipaa hasn't been verified, and it's stupid. And asking people for their email address - if I'm talking to a 92 year old woman who has hearing and vision problems, I'm not going to ask for their email address. That's stupid, and to me inconsiderate.) Point is, there is very little to no positive recognition. So for people I caught providing excellent customer service, I'd give them big stars for their desk (like certificate stars with their name on it, saying they are a star at blahblahblah), and for people who were getting discouraged, I'd leave them notes or cards on their desk. Yeah, I know I say I hate everyone, but my actions don't hold to that sometimes.

anyway, Rayette said that there are some days where she gets so frustrated that she wants to walk out, and that the cards I gave her are hanging up on her desk and she reads them for encouragement. And she almost started crying telling me about how much it meant to her that I had done that for her, which almost made ME start crying. It's nice to know I have a positive influence like that on someone's life.

also? my baby brother introduced us to his new girlfriend today. she's a single mom with 3 kids. I kinda wasn't expecting that from him, but I guess I should have been. my brothers are awesome.