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For those of you who work in a huge bureaucracy: does your bureaucracy decree that you must rely on some other internal team for a particular service? what leve

• Broken_Hippo 8y ago
  I worked at a phone company years ago. It was around the time when GTE became Verizon (it has been a while). The entire system was segmented. I was in the "disconnect department" - folks late on their bill and about to be disconnected or newly disconnected (this was for landlines). We literally could not do much more than that. We did not have any access to billing tools and could not fix those. We could not put in a repair ticket at all. We could not see cellular service. Basically, if it wasn't a disconnection reconnection or payment plan we couldn't help you. Some of this was a knowlege thing: National call centers needing to learn the ins and out of different state laws (some states public utility commissions were stricter and more powerful than others). Some of this was built in: We literally didn't have access to these things. I'm sure some of it was because training on all of the things wasn't cost effective. There were also things we simply weren't allowed to do without being a supervisor (Which was often an experienced rep working a hotline for a few hours). It does provide horrible customer service in many cases, especially if there is a wait time to another department. It would make it slightly easier if you could jump to the start of the other department's queue, but that wasn't the case. ON the other hand, many states had laws about how quickly you were supposed to answer the phones and queue jumping probably affected that.