Imagine taking a customer service job in online chat support. If you were trained for chat support but then told to do phone support instead without any training, do you think you’d do a great job or fail miserably?

In this story, one supervisor eliminates chat support in favor of phone support, and it ends up being an absolutely horrible decision.

Let’s see how the story plays out from the perspective of a chat support specialist.

My former employers lost their client (and business) because of me

A few years back in 2018 I had decided to switch employers.

I worked from home as a chat support specialist and eventually a supervisor for a major tech company.

I had decided to switch to a small time customer support agency that was just starting a new chat team. They had better pay and benefits, because they only had a small number of employees compared to the former.

The new job seems to be going well.

The description of the position I was to be hired for was another salary based supervisory role for their brand new chat team for the client. I’d basically be doing the same things as my previous job, but also spearheading this small department, while simultaneously training other co-workers with zero experience in chat support.

This was going extremely well and our client was ecstatic at the results of the new chat program. They had personally sent me an email over my progress.

The company I left was, and still is, known world wide to have the friendliest and professional customer support out of any other company. And so it was easy to apply what I learned to this new position.

A new supervisor changed everything.

After about two months of doing this the person I directly reported to, the regional supervisor, was retiring.

Our new regional came in, and was friendly at first, but decided that he didn’t want to waste his time on chat, and directed me to phone support. Which was not in my job description, nor what i was hired for by any means.

He cited that the client was unhappy with the results, which was in stark contrast to what they had told me directly.

Even after forwarding him the email, he was still not doing anything about it.

The client was not happy.

So, I complied.

It took just 2 days for the client to have reached out to me, personally.

After explaining to them the situation, they were livid.

My new regional had lied to me about his contact with the client, and had essentially ignored our clients attempt to contact him about this issue.

It’s impossible to review someone on a job they weren’t trained to do.

I had continued to work in the supervisory role for phones until the first quality review of my employees came up.

For team leads and direct call center employees both, this is where I review their interactions and grade them based off their strengths and weaknesses.

Our regional wanted me to even include the chat support team who were neither hired or trained for phones. He refused to give them training.

On every single employee who was hired for chat support, i had filed all of them as unable to be completed, and in my notations, I included that this is not the position they were hired or trained for and thus an analysis could not be accurately completed. And I sent this to both the regional manager, and our client as well, since at this point I had a direct contact email.

Uh-oh!

I was responded to the same day by whoever it is within our client who oversees all of outsourcing.

The only words I got back were “We will deal with this.”

The client held a meeting the following week with my employers. I’m not sure what was said in that meeting, but word got back to everyone that the client had dropped us for breach of contract.

Because this was a small office and our companies ONLY client for several years, this was bad.

Here’s the fallout.

After that, me and my team were offered a position with the company directly doing the things we were HIRED to do, but required us to move about 4 hours north, so unfortunately none of us decided to accept that offer.

I collected unemployment until I found a new job.

Now the company is out of business and is currently being sued by some other employees for unpaid wages. This new case has been going on since 2019.

Eliminating chat support really tanked that company. The supervisor made a horrible decision.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

This is a good point.

This never works.

I’ve had the same experience with the same company.

The CEO really should’ve been notified.

One big mistake can be the end of what used to be a successful company.

If you liked that post, check out this story about a customer who insists that their credit card works, and finds out that isn’t the case.