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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/KittyMigu on 2024-06-04 11:18:14+00:00.

This happened 3 years ago.

Back in my old job, I used to worked in a call center as an agent, my very first time working in a call center. Our company valued and monitored call time, so we were told to handle calls quickly, around 3 to 5 minutes per call, so we could assist more customers. After my training and nesting they introduced me to the production floor.

Early on, I noticed an easy way to handle calls fast. I would read the disclaimers and fine print, but the customers would just always brush me off or make me skip it or just not really care at all, so I decided to provide them an option to listen to me or just skip it entirely. I did that and in my first month working in the production floor i was praised for only having 3 to 4 minutes average call time, handling 60 to 70 customers per day. I kept on doing this method for two more months.

On my fourth month, there was a sudden change to the policy that told us to always read the disclaimers or fine print to the customers, even though they don’t want to listen to it. That meant our call time would easily double, but since I already ask my customers if they want me to read the disclaimers to them or not, I just kept on doing it my way.

At my next monthly review I was called up by Quality Assurance and my team leader regarding my calls, where they told me to not skip or omit the disclaimers. I tried to argue with them that I give my customers the option to listen to the disclaimers or not and I even read the disclaimers to the customers if they wanted to change something on their account or if the changes would charge their account even if they don’t want to listen to the disclaimer, but they were adamant on following the new policies.

Cue the malicious compliance: I talked with everyone who was also given a warning to follow the new policies and told them to just comply with the new policy, even if it cost us our call time and customer feedback. By this point, our average call time was already reaching 8 to 15 minutes, since we had to double check the customers account and their information, confirm every action we are going to take, read out paragraphs of disclaimers (there could be 2 or more disclaimers in a single call), as well as documenting the call. This doesn’t include calls where we have to get multiple people or departments involved.

Due to the unsolicited reading of the disclaimers, more and more people were starting to get irate during calls. Our company’s rating went down significantly when we received negative feedback as well as complaints from customers regarding the employees and the service. I think this cost our company some money because many people at our office were laid off. Around this time I found a better company with better pay, so I left.

TLDR: We were told to follow the new policy to the T and not omit anything from the customers, and that cost the company to lose money and customers.

thank you for U/storywards for correcting my mistake…