Exactly. Customer service jobs are actually increasing in pay and sophistication because there's less overall work to be done but what's left behind after automation is more complex.
Which is why I talked about the concept of basic income. I don't know the answer but people are arguing about whether automation is good or bad which is irrelevant. These jobs will be automated whether you like it or not. If we play our cards right then perhaps more people can pursue their passions. If we don't... well I'd rather focus on making the former happen.
Wow. I hadn't seen that at all. That's simply reflective of the enterprise-focused path they've been on for the last few years. Micro-ISVs and SMBs don't pay real money for community software only the big guys do.
Yeah I could do a whole other article on how we shifted from minimizing friction on the sign up form to actually increasing it. If it's too easy to sign up for your service it's hard to tell if your marketing actually worked and you have qualified leads or if you just have a bunch of people that "clicked here".
My assertion is that you should provide severance in all cases. I chose to attack the most contentious case (poor performance) where one might think not to provide it to prove that point.
I didn't mean this to imply that it's a regular issue I have to deal with :)
PS Priority #1 post any firing is a careful review of the hiring process that got you there.
My assertion is that you should provide severance in all cases. I chose to attack the most contentious case (poor performance) where one might think not to provide it to prove that point.
I did not mean to imply that all firings are the result of employee incompetence or poor performance. Because that's clearly not true. There are often other factors that lead to a bad "fit".
And yes, the first thing you should do post-firing is examine your hiring process to see if it could have been foreseen and prevented. But in some cases it does come down to someone just not having the experience, the talent or the work ethic to meet the performance required. It's those cases, especially with tech workers, where founders are apt to ask "do I really need to provide severance to HIM (or her)". Writing at $20K check to someone to walk out the door is never an easy thing to do especially at a startup where that $20K could go a long way. That's what I was addressing here.
In this context the original discussion revolved around someone being fired for cause (extremely poor performance). That someone was a knowledge worker and fairly well compensated. There was also little reason to believe that person wouldn't have a new job by the time they walked out the door (job market being what it is).
Thus my goal was to argue for a reason why you should always pay severance even when none of those conditions you mentioned apply. Otherwise I agree with everything you wrote.
Are the including Studios in this or just 1BR? I ask because a 1 BR is a luxury apartment for a single inhabitant. Most folks living by themselves would have a studio. SF is expensive but it's not that expensive.
It’s good to see someone taking a critical look at all the hype around “gamification.”
We (UserVoice) built our kudos and leaderboard system (which we hesitate to call “gamification”) based on the feedback we received from customer support agents who provide great Zappos-style customer service but felt they lacked any sense of accomplishment. We saw a lot of internal customer service reports in these organizations that used screenshots of positive support ticket threads to try and capture the sentiment that we now do with “kudos.”
It’s worth pointing out that there’s really two completely different worlds of customer service: the ugly, painful call center world and the much more humane version that’s coming out of internet companies like Klipfolio (check out my UserConf talk for more about this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKapwfmpvew&feature=relmf...). UserVoice users are decidedly from that latter group, so our “gamification” methods focus more on rewarding/ quantifying good work (driven by intrinsic motivations) agents are already doing. I, too, am skeptical that you could simply drop a leaderboard into a United Air Lines call center and get massively better output.
One final thing to note is that we go out of our way to make sure that kudos and our leaderboard are used for friendly agent-to-agent or agent-vs-self competition and do not become something on which managers base performance decisions. As soon as that happens, you end up with the “If you liked my service please give me a 10 in the follow-up survey call” that I’m increasingly hearing when I talk to the “old world” of customer service.
What was most surprising was the staggering amount of junk emails on larger consumer apps (user clicks "help" link, goes to Mail view, freaks out and hits send to get out of it). We've also seen Apple reject apps that link out to a web experience for customer support that has any sort of sign in link. Native all the way.