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So it's finally official...I think. By that, I mean that my new position I've been at for the past 6 weeks or so is official. I can tout the title of OTM, though I honestly can't remember what it stands for. Something something technical manager? Anyway, it's sweet and I am going to get a raise, so no more minimum wage for me, yay! Granted, minimum wage here in Cali is $10, but taxes are pretty crazy. Gas alone tends to be like a $1 higher than most other places in the country. I don't actually know how much my raise will be, as my boss didn't know what he would make it either, but I'm cool with whatever. Honestly, I never took the position for the money. Working at a survey-taking call center is pretty interesting, but working the back room to juggle all the numbers and try not let the surveys all explode is way more up my alley.
I am actually quite good working the phones. I'm not pushy or good at talking people in circles, but I'm eloquent, polite, easily amused, and I read very well. But I love working the OTM room. It's not overly confining like working the phones is. I mean, when how many minutes you take to do each survey is part of the equation as to how much our company is paid, they certainly crack the whip. I got in trouble more than once for talking to my neighbor in between calls. It can be rough to talk all day but not actually be allowed to converse with anyone. They want us to be all smooth and personable in order to get our foot in the door, but once we're in, they don't want us to bias a survey by doing something foolish like agreeing with someone or even telling them what the survey is about. Blech. But in the back room, which even has a window to see out onto the floor, I can talk to people, listen to music, surf the web in between checking all my jobs. It's more responsibility, but in a good way. More organic, while still having defined rules, which I think is how I like it.
Thankfully the other OTMs that share the room with me tend to have similar tastes in music. We listen to a lot of video game soundtracks, but there are all sorts of things we all like. I've even thrown on some Deathklok once or twice.
Granted, it can be more stressful in some ways. When you're on the phones, all you really worry about is being bored, getting yelled at (honestly doesn't happen too often), and your throat after reading 20 minute surveys for 6 hours. But being an OTM, the whole job is about the quotas. I have a handful of jobs recently that have 17 separate pages of quotas. Thankfully, most of them are set to what is pretty much infinite, but I still have to sift through them. Most jobs, I have to worry about maybe a dozen different, competing quotas that I have to try to hit all at once. They usually go: gender quotas (so many of the total have to be female, so many male, and usually they want more females), age groups (18-29,30-39,...,70+), ethnicities, and sometimes areas (so many by city, by voting region, what have you). And I have to try to hit specific numbers in each by the time we hit the daily required number of completes. We also have to try to get all the numbers to work in a specific time frame. PR (production rate), or completes per hour, is how we measure everything. We're talking in the decimal places.
My job is to try to pull, add, or focus on certain numbers to call. A great job is one where I can just let everything free-dial all day. Those don't happen nearly as often as the other ones. Whenever our quota numbers start to unbalance, or we hit a certain quota (often ages 60+ are the first to fill up) I have to pull out that category of numbers so don't keep calling the same people we can't get any more of. I have no idea where the companies that hire ours get the numbers they give us, although the numbers combined are somehow proprietary, so we can't even keep the good ones to use for other surveys, though we think voter registration is a source of a lot of them. All I know is that for most jobs we are definitely not dialing at random. These numbers have so much information attached to them (though to be fair, we get a lot of wrong numbers and such, so they're not perfect). All those quotas that we're trying to hit? We can mostly do it because a given number has age, race, region, party affiliation, gender, etc. packed in. No more old people? I'll just pull out these 3,000 numbers of that age group.
Like I said though, it is an organic job. You have no way of knowing how a day will go. A general idea at best. But maybe age group 3 suddenly shoots ahead today for no reason, but age 4 won't get a single damn complete all day even when you FORCE IT AND ONLY CALL THOSE NUMBERS AND WHY WON'T YOU BEHAVE?! I'm trying to think of a day when one of the OTMs in the room hasn't lifted their hands in frustration and quietly yelled. I tend to find most of it funny though, thankfully. Hard to pull out your hair when you're laughing.
Though the laughing usually ends when we have to call the contact manager, who is the go-between for us and the hiring company. These companies like to load us down with unreasonable goals, and we get in trouble if we can't hit them, which is stupid. Early on I realized that some of our jobs were pretty much literally impossible to do, which honestly made things easier. If you know you can't win, then you don't have to care enough to worry about a foregone conclusion. The path to walk seems to be a narrow line between caring too much and not enough. It's funny when one of my co-workers burns out doing the former and switches over to the latter. I try not to go too far in either direction. I mean, when all you have left is a couple hundred numbers to try and get black females aged 30-39 in a specific region, there just is no chance. Not going to happen. A given day we easily go through 10,000 numbers, with maybe 200-300 completes to show for it.
Also, some states are NOT friendly to call. Jackasses, all of 'em. I've noticed certain states, or certain towns in given state, can have very noticeable attitudes, be it pleasant or dickish.
Ah, nothing like a good rant to empty the baggage.
I am actually quite good working the phones. I'm not pushy or good at talking people in circles, but I'm eloquent, polite, easily amused, and I read very well. But I love working the OTM room. It's not overly confining like working the phones is. I mean, when how many minutes you take to do each survey is part of the equation as to how much our company is paid, they certainly crack the whip. I got in trouble more than once for talking to my neighbor in between calls. It can be rough to talk all day but not actually be allowed to converse with anyone. They want us to be all smooth and personable in order to get our foot in the door, but once we're in, they don't want us to bias a survey by doing something foolish like agreeing with someone or even telling them what the survey is about. Blech. But in the back room, which even has a window to see out onto the floor, I can talk to people, listen to music, surf the web in between checking all my jobs. It's more responsibility, but in a good way. More organic, while still having defined rules, which I think is how I like it.
Thankfully the other OTMs that share the room with me tend to have similar tastes in music. We listen to a lot of video game soundtracks, but there are all sorts of things we all like. I've even thrown on some Deathklok once or twice.
Granted, it can be more stressful in some ways. When you're on the phones, all you really worry about is being bored, getting yelled at (honestly doesn't happen too often), and your throat after reading 20 minute surveys for 6 hours. But being an OTM, the whole job is about the quotas. I have a handful of jobs recently that have 17 separate pages of quotas. Thankfully, most of them are set to what is pretty much infinite, but I still have to sift through them. Most jobs, I have to worry about maybe a dozen different, competing quotas that I have to try to hit all at once. They usually go: gender quotas (so many of the total have to be female, so many male, and usually they want more females), age groups (18-29,30-39,...,70+), ethnicities, and sometimes areas (so many by city, by voting region, what have you). And I have to try to hit specific numbers in each by the time we hit the daily required number of completes. We also have to try to get all the numbers to work in a specific time frame. PR (production rate), or completes per hour, is how we measure everything. We're talking in the decimal places.
My job is to try to pull, add, or focus on certain numbers to call. A great job is one where I can just let everything free-dial all day. Those don't happen nearly as often as the other ones. Whenever our quota numbers start to unbalance, or we hit a certain quota (often ages 60+ are the first to fill up) I have to pull out that category of numbers so don't keep calling the same people we can't get any more of. I have no idea where the companies that hire ours get the numbers they give us, although the numbers combined are somehow proprietary, so we can't even keep the good ones to use for other surveys, though we think voter registration is a source of a lot of them. All I know is that for most jobs we are definitely not dialing at random. These numbers have so much information attached to them (though to be fair, we get a lot of wrong numbers and such, so they're not perfect). All those quotas that we're trying to hit? We can mostly do it because a given number has age, race, region, party affiliation, gender, etc. packed in. No more old people? I'll just pull out these 3,000 numbers of that age group.
Like I said though, it is an organic job. You have no way of knowing how a day will go. A general idea at best. But maybe age group 3 suddenly shoots ahead today for no reason, but age 4 won't get a single damn complete all day even when you FORCE IT AND ONLY CALL THOSE NUMBERS AND WHY WON'T YOU BEHAVE?! I'm trying to think of a day when one of the OTMs in the room hasn't lifted their hands in frustration and quietly yelled. I tend to find most of it funny though, thankfully. Hard to pull out your hair when you're laughing.
Though the laughing usually ends when we have to call the contact manager, who is the go-between for us and the hiring company. These companies like to load us down with unreasonable goals, and we get in trouble if we can't hit them, which is stupid. Early on I realized that some of our jobs were pretty much literally impossible to do, which honestly made things easier. If you know you can't win, then you don't have to care enough to worry about a foregone conclusion. The path to walk seems to be a narrow line between caring too much and not enough. It's funny when one of my co-workers burns out doing the former and switches over to the latter. I try not to go too far in either direction. I mean, when all you have left is a couple hundred numbers to try and get black females aged 30-39 in a specific region, there just is no chance. Not going to happen. A given day we easily go through 10,000 numbers, with maybe 200-300 completes to show for it.
Also, some states are NOT friendly to call. Jackasses, all of 'em. I've noticed certain states, or certain towns in given state, can have very noticeable attitudes, be it pleasant or dickish.
Ah, nothing like a good rant to empty the baggage.
no subject
Date: 2016-06-24 05:25 am (UTC)From: