In February 2005 MCI Mass Markets started a project called Premier Customer Service, to provide specialized customer service representatives to targeted segments of its residential customer base. The project is a failure.
First, the current news. MCI announced Friday that it is closing its Iowa City call center on September 30th. In statements to the press, an MCI spokesperson said the center primarily employs telemarketers. I think someone at MCI got their centers mixed up, for this is not true. There were no telemarketers in Iowa City since they were all laid off a year ago.
The Iowa City center primarily performs document processing and customer correspondence. In recent years these functions have been partially moved to Bangalore, India, and the center closure completes this move. Other employees perform order processing for certain complex order types, and this function has also been moved to other centers. MCI also started its e-Customer Service program in Iowa City, providing customer service via email, and it too has been moved to India.
But the big project in Iowa City, since the first of February this year, was Premier Customer Service.
This program was to target specific segments of the residential customer base, such as the top spending customers, and those in specific geographic areas, and instead of routing their customer service calls to the Philippines, where most MCI residential customer service calls go, to send them to people in Iowa City. Representatives were trained to handle almost any billing, service or repair issue.
This didn’t go over well with those chosen to actually do this work. All of them had worked on higher-level customer service projects, and many felt they had been demoted. Almost everyone felt they were underpaid and underappreciated, and work was in progress to unionize the center’s employees.
A few months into the project, MCI began sending large volumes of additional customers into the Premier segment, resulting in frequent hold times of an hour or more for callers, and greatly increased stress on the employees. Then last month MCI moved some employees in its Sergeant Bluff, Iowa, center onto the Premier segment to help with the volume of calls. With the center closure, all Premier calls would go to Sergeant Bluff, just outside Sioux City, Iowa, or elsewhere.
“I hate this place,” one Iowa City MCI employee said to me. Then another, and another, and pretty soon just about everybody. “MCI doesn’t care about its customers.” Well, they do care, but not about you residential customers with your home phones. A combination of business processes and flawed backend order processing systems result in timeframes of several weeks to process simple orders such as installing a telephone line, when in almost all circumstances the line could be installed in seven days or less. I have been provided countless examples of such orders.
Instead, MCI cares about its commercial, enterprise and government customers. This is where the real money comes from, and you can bet your last dollar that those backend systems work, and if they don’t, there is someone on the case immediately.
If you’re an MCI residential customer, and you recently spoke to someone in the U.S. who understood every word you were saying, rather than in the Philippines, it’s likely you were speaking to one of these Iowa City representatives. Virtually all of them have years of experience and the know-how to get almost anything done that you might need. However, these people are losing their jobs.
What possessed MCI to close the Iowa City center, and tell the press it was full of telemarketers, I cannot begin to guess. Perhaps it was a miscommuncation at some executive level. But I’m more inclined to believe it was intentional.
Every project in Iowa City has been in the process of being duplicated elsewhere, usually offshore, for years now. Even new projects brought in were very quickly duplicated at another center. I suspect management has intended to close Iowa City for a long time. I didn’t really expect it so soon, but the attempts at organizing may have caused management to revise their timetable.
“I know someone at the CWA and he’s ready to come down and speak to us about organizing,” said an MCI employee on condition of anonymity.
I said earlier that Premier Customer Service is a failure. By closing Iowa City, where virtually all of MCI’s knowledge regarding residential customer processes resides in the minds of its employees, and moving it to Sergeant Bluff, which has far less experience in working complex issues, MCI has lowered the level of service it provides to this targeted segment of its customer base.
But MCI is, even now, not terribly concerned with service. From the start, representatives were asked to collect an email address from every customer, and to attempt to set up automatic credit card billing. Recently MCI also asked its Premier representatives to begin upselling other products and services to its existing customer base. Management used various slogans such as “Sales is service” in order to try to make this bitter pill easier to swallow, but few bought it.
Iowa City took on MCI’s most complex projects and made them exceed all expectations, partly due to the city’s highly educated workforce. MCI will be hard-pressed to find any place that can provide comparable quality of work, but it may not have to.
With the pending Verizon merger, MCI will likely have to divest itself of its Mass Markets business unit to receive FCC approval. Customers will then have to choose between switching their residential and small business phones to Verizon, or being switched to the service provider that buys the business unit.
In Iowa City, 200 people will be laid off. At the moment, I’m not sure there are 200 jobs to be had in eastern Iowa.
Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works license.
Video published by this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Sampling+ license.
Bad Behavior has blocked 3422 access attempts in the last 7 days.
Facebook
Digg
del.icio.us
reddit.com
Newsvine
Aug 01, 2005
MacManX.com » Blogroll Dive: 8/1/05
one IOT rep
Aug 09, 2005
Well, at least we get severance pay. MCI deserves to loose Iowa City. It’s divine justife for treating its employees and residential customers like excrement. As for the employees, it’s time to move on to better places.
Aug 18, 2005
MCI closes three U.S. centers - Phone Watch
jack
May 02, 2006
hey hello this is jack, i work for mci customer service in cordoba, argentina in a place called Apex, i liked very much to read this news because we dont receive any kind of information, we only get this kind of info by reading on papers on the trash but thas ilegal
. i have some news that i will like to confirm, since there was a merge betwen verizon and mci there are a lot of centers all over the world that are being closed instantly and we are getting alot of lies about why, the thing is that we are being destroyed by verizon and i think that in this stroy you are telling is maybe some “lies” from mci and verizon (im not meaning that you are liying at us, because we get info by alot of different sources) but maybe that we are getting this story and mci is about to have the same future as GTE, gte is another company that was bought by verizon and was “destroyed” by them and now is just a company in fl and some other unliked places by verizon, if you have any news about this i will like to discuss this with you 
cya good luck…
jack from cs
Michael Hampton
May 02, 2006
Verizon has decided it will focus on large businesses and government customers, apparently to the detriment of residential and small business customers. I’ve read lately that another four U.S. centers will close, and at least one of them served the SMB (small-medium business) segment. I forget which are the other three. I really don’t know where the jobs are going. I haven’t watched Verizon as closely since I don’t work there anymore.
Noah
Oct 13, 2006
Jack-
You’re out of compliance– get back on the phones!!
Anonymous
Nov 04, 2006
MCI Customer Service is a joke – a bad one.
They owe my 3 weeks of service credit for totally
screwing up my residential move. We were without
phone service due to their representative not abiding
by the date of our planned move. They transferred
our service 3 weeks too early – we had NO phone service
during this time period, however they continued to
bill us for their services. I was promised a credit
on my phone bill – guess what? Never happened and
each customer service rep. claimed they knew nothing
of the credit promise and never seemed to grasp the
situtation even when outlined in great detail, including
dates. MCI Customer Service is HORRIBLE!!!!!!!!
A day after I discontinued service with them, they
called to ask if the could ‘win my service back’.
Get real!! One of the reps I attempted to communicate
with had a heavy Indian accent – I could not understand
a word he was saying. Very frustrating experience
and happy to be RID of MCI!
Anonymous
May 17, 2007
I’ve been a residential customer of MCI for the past couple years and all was well UNTIL I had to call for repair service and interact or I’ll say “try to converse” with the service reps. in who know’s what country. I was so angry and frustrated by the time I hung up the phone that I e-mailed MCI. First, they never asked me if my personal information could be available to employees in India or whever they direct the calls. I told them what a lousey way to save a few bucks by moving their customer service half way around the world to individuals that can barely understand me or me understand them. I was hot! I received a reply within minutes that was full of glorified reasons why MCI has taken this action and how it makes their service “seamless”. Yes, that was the word Hudata used in my e-mail. I would say the service is more like a huge crater. I knew our relationship was destined to end when I saw the name. I can’t wait to get away from them BUT where do I go from here? Does anyone use call centers in the USA anymore? My other phones are AT&T and they are business lines so I get excellent service and response.
Nancy
Jan 16, 2008
The author is disgruntled and spreading misinformation. Sergeant Bluff IA was one of the first call centers for MCI, with some of the longest tenure prior to the bankruptcy. The real issue was not that the Iowa City call center was closed, calls types sent elsewhere, but that Bernie Ebbers was a (&^%$&*. Every center at one point or another would bring up a new campaign, perfect it and the campaign would then be moved to another center – either as primary or backup.
It is refreshing that this person has pride in the place that they worked; however, do not put down other facilities – the employee’s there feel as strongly about their places of employment as you do. Many of the decisions that were made by upper management were because of the mess that Bernie made. They were attempting to save the company.
I will not try to teach you basic business, let alone how to manage call centers, but it is never a good business decision to have only one call center do something that is specialized. What would happen if that call center closed due to – oh – snow. This was a common reason for any of the Iowa centers to close for either hours or a full day.
I hope that you have been able to move on after MCI.
Michael Hampton
Jan 16, 2008
The author was also one of Iowa City’s top people. It’s true that I was disgruntled when I wrote this, though after rereading it I’m unable to find the misinformation you say I’m spreading. Perhaps it is because I omitted a lot of information that the company might consider confidential.
In the two and a half years since this was written, I’ve learned a whole lot about business, (by starting one!) and I have to agree that much of the blame for this can be laid squarely at the feet of Bernie Ebbers. If you can get in to prison to see him, that is.
I also agree that it’s a bad idea to not have redundancy in any critical business process, even and especially when it’s specialized. The weather, though, wasn’t nearly as serious an issue until Iowa City began taking customer service calls. I was around in 1997 when what’s now known as e-Customer Service started, and I worked it. At the time, it was that, correspondence, and TM. It didn’t really matter much if the center closed for half a day for the weather, and that happened maybe once or twice a year anyway. With incoming calls, though, it became a bit more serious.
My complaint was not so much that projects were moved out of Iowa City, but that when projects were moved out of Iowa City, the other centers often did not seem to execute them nearly as well as we had. That’s not to put down the other facilities, as you say. It’s in part having had a highly educated workforce, and in part people in other centers too often getting hold of an issue that someone in Iowa City was working and screwing it up. The company had at least acknowledged this latter issue, though by the time I left not much had been done about it.
My larger complaint was about the nature of Premier Customer Service, the last sizable project brought in to Iowa City. I think I’ve sufficiently addressed that already.
Finally, oh yes, I did move on. Now I own my very own VoIP service provider. So I’ve had to learn a few things. One of which is that it costs a lot more to acquire a customer than to retain one. I knew about this previously, of course, but there’s a big difference between hearing the words and fully experiencing it right in your own wallet. Ah, the joys of being a small business owner. Ironically, I now work fewer hours and make more money than I did working for MCI.
ex-residentialclient
Feb 08, 2008
Reading these blogs has been a real eye opener.
These MCI leaders (I say that skeptically) are supposed to be educated professionals who are accountable for their staff and all decisions that are made in the day to day business world.
MCI-Verizon are poor representative of “quality” American business leaders; as evidenced by how they have hurt their employees, their customers and the economy. A course on professional competencies, successful business practices and business ethics need to be incorporated into all MCI-Verizon’s employess annual competency training, especially the management. I would also recommend metrics on customer satisfaction/dissatisfaction so you know where you are headed. You may even consider the use of available data to take a little proactive initiative to change your downward spiral with your ongoing (years & years) of fraudulent billing practices, your lack of corporate integrity & responsibility to your own employees, governing boards and the USA.