241–250 of 291 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is it illegal to fire people in Germany?
Because they're not firing. They're jerks, trying to force them out by moving them to a crap subsidiary without benefits, maybe forced relocation to another country (!), etc. Firing people means paying severance. They want to avoid doing that and for obvious reasons in many countries that's illegal. I guess they figured possible lawsuits are cheaper.
My first large employer was Best Buy, and at the time (and I believe still?) a large majority of their phone customer service operation was outsourced. I will still never understand why companies do this. Your quite literal last line of defense (and sometimes first) with a customer is people that aren't directly accountable other than a corporate contract? Never made sense to me. Also, the fact that they are generall…
> I will still never understand why companies do this. Specialization and economies of scale. Best Buy's core competence isn't phone customer service. A phone customer service can specialize and develop tools and processes that Best Buy couldn't. They can also serve multiple companies with a smaller workforce due to increased utilisation rate (a bit similar to why cloud hosting has become so popular). > Also, the fac…
So then outsourced CS should be better than in-house. But it doesn't seem to work like that.
> almost anyone who can talk is qualified to do phone customer service
That's not consistent with my own experience; for example, many third-world telephone CS outfits employ staff with accents so thick that I can't understand them. I mean they may be able to talk in some language; but they're not that good at talking English. Outsourced CS reps are much more likely to just hang up on the caller if it looks like it might be a difficult call.
Also, "qualified" is doing quite a lot of work there. Anyone that can talk (the customer's language) is qualified to pick up the phone and follow a script. But good customer service means reps that know the product, and don't need a script.
In Germany this isn't a legal move. One of my former employees (global telco everyone knows) tried to do the same, namely moving the contracts of the employees to an other company. 200 of them started a class action and won easily. The company had to terminate their contracts (which means the employees are eligible for unemployment benefits, etc.) and had to pay a good severance. Something like (years of employment)…
The Netherlands has liberalized worker rights to the point it would make Elon Musk cry. This place is a weird mix of Marxism and laissez-faire capitalism.
Maybe if you actually read some stuff, you'd know this.
To me, deciding to outsource customer support and hiring are huge red flags. People / Customers are not at the center of the company any more, but behind a wall. Incentives get shifted, and core business becomes a service. Not a good news.
Outsourced teams will never care about their work as much as an internal team does and because of that everything else suffers.
Such a shame.
Meh. They are just terrible. We once booked a hotel with a children's bed, which was advertised as an option on Booking.com . When we go there, no bed, and they could provide one. After much discussion, they allowed us to cancel the room and they would refund the 125 Euro. Except the refund never came. So, we contacted booking.com and have been passed between support personnel for months. At some point they wanted mo…
Yeah, these kinds of "customer" "service"'s job is to dick around with you until you give up. Same story with the plentiful cases of AirBnB "customer" "service" just offering partial refund, etc, etc.
To me, deciding to outsource customer support and hiring are huge red flags. People / Customers are not at the center of the company any more, but behind a wall. Incentives get shifted, and core business becomes a service. Not a good news.
I worked as a consultant with a phone operator who were insourcing their inhouse sales (telemarketing) after having it outsourced. What they had discovered was that by outsourcing that function they had lost a large chunk of their overall talent pool that they could recruit from to almost any other function (especially sales of course).
Went from having a dedicated human to talk to knowing me, and being aware of what kind of team people were running to having generic folks on the phone crawling linkedin profiles for me.
Who do you think was having a better success rate at finding the right candidate?
In companies where there are many roles open, someone needs to be aware of what kind of team would fit the profile to ensure success.
A couple years later, half the teams were using under the radar private hiring firms to help find talents.
A loss on all sides.
In Germany this isn't a legal move. One of my former employees (global telco everyone knows) tried to do the same, namely moving the contracts of the employees to an other company. 200 of them started a class action and won easily. The company had to terminate their contracts (which means the employees are eligible for unemployment benefits, etc.) and had to pay a good severance. Something like (years of employment)…
The Netherlands has liberalized worker rights to the point it would make Elon Musk cry. This place is a weird mix of Marxism and laissez-faire capitalism.
Basically, the directive prevents businesses sidestepping laws and contracts that protect employees' rights by transferring those employees to another organisation. Seems reasonable to me (if you share my view that employees have rights).
They're outsourcing their customer services. Thia is actually quite annoying, because the one time I've used their customer services they were really good. I needed to cancel half of a reservation (booked for 2 nights, needed to leave early), and the hotel staff said they couldn't do that as I'd booked through a third party. I called Booking.com and they made it happen. Hopefully whoever they outsource to can continu…
Run. Run far away and as fast as you can from this kind of move when you see it.
Outsourcing moves like this are a signal that the leadership views operations as a cost center of script-following monkeys. It won't blow them up, but it will consign a part of their organization to mediocrity, open to competitive attack.
Contrast that with the organizations I've seen who unlock the real value of operations: partners on the front line who feel the trends in their aggregate customer interactions, who are continuously, intricately involved in instrumenting operational data gathering based upon their gut feeling of those trends to drive rationalized product improvements. Software and data analytics makes it all possible, at a scale and granularity never before possible.
Any Booking.com engineers reading this are welcome to apply to join us a TableCheck ( https://www.tablecheck.com/en/company/jobs/ ) We see Booking.com's online travel agent ("OTA") model as fundamentally predatory/parasitic to hospitality operators. Our business is designed to cut-out of the likes of Booking.com and other middlemen--let the operators own the guest data and build direct relationship with their guests.
Booking.com employees are bound by non-compete clauses so you will never get anyone directly from Booking.com in your company.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think any Booking user knows that 8+ - awesome, 7+ - okay, less than 7 - handle with care. At least it's more consistent than "star ratings"
That's known as the Net Promoter Score. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_promoter_score In summary: 1-6 are demoters (will talk negatively of their experience to others), 7-8 passive (probably won't talk about their experience), 9-10 promoters (will talk positively about their experience).