The mission of PPL is to help good causes. This would suggest that this is at the heart of the company and that they would do their upmost to treat staff fairly and like humans. Sadly this is not the case for most of those in Customer Experience. We sit with our headsets on and take cancellations, sales, complaints and admin requests. We try to give every single one of these calls 100 percent and are rewarded by having the dialler running in between these calls all day long. We are expected to beg past players to return and hound people who entered their email address on to the website. If we are told by someone on the phone that they are not interested we are expected to ‘objection handle’ until they join or hang up on us in anger. When they hang up on us we are expected to phone them back as this could have been an ‘accident’. A lot of staff have been signed off with stress and this is due to the fact that we are not robots. As a human myself i understand why they would need to be signed of with stress. I feel upset and ignored. By plonking us down on our seats and forcing us to anger strangers and take rejection constantly you batter our mental health. We are given no time to recover.
I understand how important customer service is, the way the department is run currently is not focused on customer service. It is focused on sales and retention through any means possible. If you really want to retain players, allow us hardworking, exhausted and sad employees to focus on customer service. At the end of a long day of ‘warm’ calling, I can guarantee the people who have chosen to call are not receiving 100 percent service.
It is impossible to explain this to any management as we are told this is ‘our job’ and we have to get on with it. This is a terrible way to deal with staff feedback and makes no sense as there are other Customer Experience Agents with completely different job roles. A lucky selection of employees were selected from a hat to receive extra training and more responsibilities. They do not need to hit targets with retention calls and do not need to dial outbound anymore. Those of us still on the phone are rarely offered the opportunity to do emails, if we are offered we are told it is a treat. I speak to people who were selected from the hat and they are actually happy going to work and do not constantly feel down and depressed. They have said they will never return to just working on the phone again.
Many of us on the phone exceed in hitting our targets, in-spite of how much we dislike our jobs we do our best. As soon as we have hit our target the month ends and we are back to square one. Nothing is rewarded and we try to climb back up to these demanding targets again for the next month.
We have recently been informed that there will no longer be the option to cancel subscriptions on the website and that this will all be done over the phone. Having listened to a huge number of complaints from players about how hard we make it to cancel and having read recent trust pilot reviews from customers who are deeply unhappy at needing to phone to do this, I know this will be extremely difficult for those of us who need to take these calls.
I speak to past employees who have spoken to HR about how hard it is in Customer Experience but nothing ever changes. Looking at the comments here it would seem that this is because you do no want to hear negativity from staff.
