So, how did NDC make money from messages being sent to alpha-numeric pagers? Enough money to pay around 1,500 Dispatch Agents and a hundred administrators? It's relatively simple. Subscribers had to pay a monthly rate for their pagers. Subscribers also had to pay extra for the pages they received.
I don't know for a fact, but I think each monthly subscription included a certain number of what were referred to as "Revenue Units." If you exceeded your allotment of Revenue Units for the month, you had to pay about 10 cents for each unit you went over your allotment. (Akin to going over on your data plan on your mobile phone.) On most pagers, each Revenue Unit was comprised of 20 characters. Since most pagers could hold 100 characters, it was possible for one message to take up five Revenue Units. If a page only contained 20 characters, that would be one Revenue Unit. If the page contained 21 characters, that was two Revenue Units. Since the bonuses were tied to the number of Revenue Units the agents produced each month, many would do what they could to pop the message into an extra Revenue Unit. Sometimes, this included double-spacing at the end of a sentence. Sometimes, it was fully spelling out words that could be abbreviated (like "meeting" instead of "MTG").
I mentioned in an earlier post that the service was notably used by people in the sports and entertainment industries. There were a lot of other businesses that used the pagers on a regular basis, like Wall Street firms, sanitation companies, delivery services, medical offices, maid services, etc. We served a variety of users.
But some pagers were clearly being used strictly for personal needs, many of them VERY personal needs (but there were certain words and phrases we were forbidden from using). As long as they were paying for those Revenue Units, it really didn't matter what the caller wanted sent out as long as we could rack up the fees.
Every once in a while, I would get a request to send out a message to an entire group of pagers. This meant I could really rack up the revenue units on just one call. It was nice to do something that would get me closer to making bonus each month.
If there were any complaints about people or companies feeling they were being overbilled for Revenue Units, we never heard about it. No one ever issued any memos about sticking to the mandatory abbreviations or anything. The company just seemed to be happy letting us run up those charges on the clients as we wished.
This is how we earned bonuses: Each Dispatch Agent had to generate a certain number of Revenue Units as compared to the number of hours that were worked each month. In addition, the Average Handle Time (AHT) had to be less than 40 seconds and Quality Assurance scores had to average above 90%. Also, you couldn't have any active written warnings on your record.
My AHT was less than 60 seconds per call during my first week. However, I found I improved to the expectation by the end of the month. It really didn't take long to adjust my speed. After awhile, I was handling close to 500 calls a day when I worked my Monday, Tuesday and Friday shifts. Saturdays were a little slower and Sundays were WAY slower.
I did not qualify for the bonus at first because one needs to have been working the full month. I didn't begin my shift until January 10th. But even if I did qualify, I wouldn't have had enough Revenue Units. I had to consider that first month a wash. But just as my onsite trainer predicted, I was able to meet all the goals for February and I continued to do so for the next six months. I never did make the "Top 10%" bonus. The main reason why was because I wasn't producing enough Revenue Units on Sundays. If I didn't work Sundays, I probably would have been able to make that extra bonus. But as I found out later, the "Top 10%" was not out of all the Dispatch Agents, it was only out of those who made bonus. So if only 150 agents made bonus, there were only 15 who got that extra bonus.
And I guess I should visit how the ladder for promotions was set up. The call center was broken up into various teams. Each team could have anywhere from 30 to 60 Dispatch Agents. Each team had a Supervisor. Each Supervisor had an assistant, referred to as a Lead Dispatch Agent, or LDA. Since most teams at the Chesapeake location had employees working all seven days a week, there would be a couple of days that the Supervisor wasn't there, but the LDA was, and vice versa. Usually, the Supervisor had the weekend off and the LDA had to work then. Above the Supervisors were the Call Center Managers. When I started work, there were three of them. Above the manager was the Director of Operations. After that, you get into Chief Operations Officer and Vice President territory.
So this serves as a breakdown of what kept NDC running. Tomorrow, I'll look at some of the more interesting aspects of the job.
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