May 2012
It was the first day of training and Jeremy had never been so eager for a day of work. He dressed and was out the door in a blur, arriving at 7:30 for an eight o’clock start time. The parking lot was deserted outside of the office building as the morning sun splayed its rays across the facade.
He waited for others to arrive and enter the building, then followed them in. M.K. greeted him, showing him to the training room along with a quick tour of the kitchen: an open space with two large refrigerators and a ping pong table.
M.K. left him in the kitchen to rummage through the cupboards in search of a quick breakfast. He made a mental note of the snacks he came across and settled on a cereal bar and a bottle of orange juice, before returning to the training room.
The front of the room had a pull-down projector screen displaying E-Nonymous’ logo. Below the screen was a table with an open laptop and stacks of papers. Two long rows of desks faced the front, with five desktop computers in each row. Name tags were clipped to the tops of each monitor; he saw the one with his name, and took his seat.
A couple others were already seated in the row behind him. Jeremy nodded and smiled to them as he sat down.
A short Asian man walked in with a pep in his step. “Good morning, everybody,” he said energetically. “My name is Jason Tong, and I’ll be training you for the next two weeks!”
By Jeremy’s judgment, Jason was roughly his age, if not younger. His black hair spiked up like a sea urchin and his eyes scanned the room as he took a sip of coffee from an E-Nonymous thermos.
“I look forward to getting to know all of you!” Jason put his thermos down and circled the room to shake the three newbie’s hands.
Jeremy stood to greet him and found that Jason was as short as he was, which was unusual. “Nice to meet you, Jason,” he said. “Happy to be here.”
“The pleasure is all mine,” Jason replied. “Welcome to the team.”
As Jason made his rounds, two more people entered the room. “Ah, Peter and Patrick!” Jason hurried over to them. “Great seeing you guys, please take a seat.” He gestured to their empty desks.
“Pleasure to be back in training, bud,” the one named Patrick said. He plopped down in the chair next to Jeremy. “Hey, bud,” he said. “Name’s Patrick. You can call me Pat, or whatever you want really.”
“Nice to meet you,” Jeremy shook his hand. “Do you know Jason already?”
Patrick looked down, scratched his sandy hair, and cracked a smile. He looked up with droopy blue eyes. “Yeah, I know him. I think I’m the only person to get fired then rehired a month later. Gotta love start-ups!”
Patrick noticed the confusion on Jeremy’s face. “I started in sales. I sucked. They fired me. Then they call me two weeks ago and offered me this customer service position.”
“I see,” Jeremy said. He’d never understood how some people could spill their life story to a stranger.
The tall, scrawny man in glasses named Peter shuffled behind Jeremy to take a seat on the other side of Patrick. He sat back and propped his foot across his knee, showing off his hairy legs, his toenails hanging out of his sandals.
Pretty laid-back for the first day, Jeremy thought, hoping he wouldn’t have to see too many more pairs of feet up close. He glanced around and noticed that both Patrick and Jason wore sandals. Jason sat on the front desk, legs dangling.
A very tall woman entered the room. She looked like a college basketball player with her slender build and athletic attire. A guy was with her, smiling awkwardly as he passed, keeping his head down as his pale face flushed. He had graying hair, and was definitely the oldest person in the class.
“Alright, everyone. Time for us to get started!” Jason announced. He scanned the room. “I’m Jason, and we’re going to become the best of friends over the next two weeks. We’ll be meeting in here every morning to go through training on the E-Nonymous products and procedures, legal matters, and of course, how it all ties in to your job. Later this week we’ll hit the floor so you can do some call listening with the more experienced reps.”
They all nodded.
“Let’s get started,” Jason continued. “This morning will be all about the company. How we got where we are today and what the future looks like.”
Jason held a remote and clicked it to change the slide. The company logo gave way to a big, bold lettered statement: WE DON’T HIRE ASSHOLES!
“First thing to know about E-Nonymous is that we don’t hire assholes,” Jason said as they all chuckled. “We’re more than a company—we’re a family. If you put yourself above the good of the team, you likely won’t last too long. We can only move our company forward by working together as a finely tuned machine. Besides, our mission is to help people dealing with serious issues, so why would we employ an asshole?”
The morning carried on while they learned of the young company’s history and founder, Sami Eger. Sami had come from Norway to study psychology at Stanford. With a master’s degree in hand, and a hunger for helping people dealing with suicidal thoughts, addiction, and mental illness, Sami decided to start his own network of fellow psychology students for people to call.
It started as an experiment, to see how many people would utilize such a program. There were already suicide hotlines, quit-smoking lines, and a number for gambling addicts to call. They could all be found running commercials on TV in the middle of the night.
Sami wanted to differentiate his service, to be more appealing. Attending school in the heart of the technology world, Silicon Valley, Sami realized the importance of making it more accessible than the typical hotline. He connected with software engineers on campus, told them his idea, and within two weeks he had a fully functioning mobile phone application called E-Nonymous.
The app incorporated Sami’s vision: people across the spectrum could be in touch with an expert with a tap of the finger. The app allowed direct phone calls, emails, and Sami’s priority, a live chat option. He knew most people found comfort in hiding behind their screens, to keep their identity confidential. The live chat option addressed that head-on, which meant Sami could save many more lives, by giving those too shy to pick up the phone a means of communication.
It took only four months for word to spread about the new, free app and its unique features. After reaching 100,000 downloads, Sami decided to implement a small fee for users to connect with the team of psychologists. His hope was that the fee would help curb the incoming traffic for his small team, which had grown to twenty psychologists around the country.
His plan worked for a couple of weeks, but popularity grew despite the fee and by the end of month six E-Nonymous had 100,000 paying users and had evolved to a fully functioning business.
Sami had no problem connecting with angel investors in the Valley and accepted an offer of eight million dollars in seed funding to help grow the app into an actual business. He had limited knowledge of business, so he hired a friend from Stanford’s business school to assume the role of Chief Financial Officer.
E-Nonymous opened their first official office in downtown San Francisco during the summer of 2011. The original team of ten psychologists assumed roles as executives and upper management, along with ten others located across the country. Over the following year, with some wise investments in marketing and engineering, E-Nonymous grew into a juggernaut in the industry and reached five million downloads of the app. This rapid growth led to the need for expansion and Sami decided on Denver for the location of their new sales and service office.
“And that’s how we got here today,” Jason said.
*****
The remainder of day one’s training flew by, after a deep dive into the company’s products and service. Jeremy’s brain felt fried from the knowledge packed into it after the long day.
He went home that night knowing that he now worked for a company that cared more about its employees than its executives. The feeling was so overwhelming, Jeremy had trouble sleeping that night.
The E-Nonymous mission statement hung on the wall in the kitchen: Use our intelligence and care to help those in need. The first week of training moved along, with hours of information to digest, but Jeremy loved every moment of it. He tried to remain a silent sponge, absorbing all the information, but sitting next to Patrick made that difficult.
Patrick was a natural social butterfly, always talking with those around him, and raising good points during group discussions.
“So what do you think, bro?” Patrick asked Jeremy toward the end of their second day together. “Pretty easy job.”
“I’d say so,” Jeremy said. “Answer the phone, connect people to the doctors, and chat with others on the internet. Doesn’t seem too bad.”
Jeremy downplayed his passion with Patrick. He looked forward to helping their clients. There was even the chance someone would call in to the main line and need to be talked off the ledge, literally.
“I hope you’re all ready to get on the phones this afternoon,” Jason said on Wednesday, the third day of training.
They looked at each other in puzzlement, enticing a laugh from Jason.
“I’m kidding!” he cackled. “You’ll just be listening, to get an idea how it’s done. Come back from lunch prepared and ready to ask questions.”
When they returned from lunch, each of the trainees was assigned a current employee they would sit with for the remainder of the afternoon. “Call shadowing is the most important part of your training,” Jason said. “This will be your first exposure to your job, so be sure to learn all you can. We’ll meet at 3:30 to discuss how it went. Now, head on out to the floor and find your partner.”
Jeremy was assigned to Roberta Gonzales. He followed the group out of the training room, through the kitchen, and onto “the floor.” Aside from a quick tour around the office on the first day, Jeremy hadn’t explored much outside of the kitchen.
Stepping onto the floor and seeing all the desks crammed together with no dividers between them made Jeremy feel at home. Everyone looked so relaxed; some even had their shoes off while they sat back in their chairs, mid-conversation. Nearly everyone was on the phone, creating a loud jumble of noise that spread across the room.
The desks were arranged in small groupings of six, two rows of three facing one another, with a seventh desk on the end, where the managers sat. Jason had mentioned that no one had their own office, regardless of their position. All the rooms surrounding the perimeter were used as meeting spaces. Jeremy noticed the department’s director, Shelly Williamson, seated at her desk in the middle of the floor.
That’s so cool, he thought, remembering how rarely Sammy came out of his fish bowl at the stadium.
He sought out Roberta’s desk, remembering her from a brief introduction in the kitchen. She was the only other older person at the company, likely in her fifties if he had to guess. She looked a bit ill, with pale skin and virtually no flesh around her bone, bruises and gashes spotting her arms and legs. Despite her crypt-keeper appearance, Jeremy found her to be a kind person, after their short conversation in the kitchen.
He found her at an island of desks with her headset on, speaking articulately to the person on the phone.
“Yes, sir, I know that’s what you were originally told, but I’m telling you how it really works,” she said, shaking her head as she scribbled notes on her pad. She noticed Jeremy, cracked a smile, and waved him over while she wrapped up her call.
Oh, shit. That doesn’t sound like a psych call, that’s a customer service call.
Roberta concluded her call and pressed her release button angrily to hang up the phone. “That guy was pleasant,” she said through clenched teeth. Jeremy watched Roberta fill out a form on her screen.
“After each call we have to fill out a case to track the activity on each account, and our productivity,” Roberta explained as the cursor jumped from field to field on the screen. She reached into a drawer beneath her desk and pulled out a second headset, connected the wires into her own, and handed it to Jeremy.
“Here you go,” she said. “You’ll be able to listen to my calls through here.”
The phone rang, flashing green lights. “It’s go time,” she said, and answered the call.
Over the first hour Jeremy listened to seven calls, back to back, with standard three-minute breaks of wrap up time in between. The calls seemed like standard customer service issues. E-Nonymous made its big money selling packages of their service to corporations. The calls he heard were simple billing or user account questions. He wondered where his psychology background was going to come into play, and asked Roberta if that hour stretch was the norm for her types of calls.
“Yes. We mostly handle account issues. There was a time when we would get emergency calls, but now those get directed to the doctors. Every now and then one will come through, but that’s rare.”
“I see,” Jeremy replied, disappointed he wouldn’t have the opportunity to help people, at least to start. He was also growing uneasy at the thought of fielding hundreds of calls with little break in between. At least at the Bears he could count on consistently slow times of the year. During the off season, receiving more than three calls in an entire shift was a busy day.
There’s no off season in mental health, he thought.
“You wanna take some calls?” Roberta asked, popping an old french fry into her mouth.
“Sure, why not?” Jeremy said. If it was just plain old customer service, it was no different from handling angry baseball fans.
Roberta wheeled back from her desk to clear the way for Jeremy. “It’s all yours,” she said with a grin. She handed him her headset and he fit it snugly over his head, positioning the mouth piece to its proper place. “Just take the calls and talk. I’ll be right here to walk you through what to do.”
Jeremy nodded and clicked to put his phone into ready status. Two minutes passed without an incoming call. He looked around in curiosity, as it appeared everyone else was on the phone.
He caught Kristan, the tall woman, across the room, watching him with a quizzical look on her face. She mouthed, “Are you taking calls?” to which Jeremy returned a proud nod.
The phone finally rang, and he felt his heart sink into his gut. He took a deep breath and answered, “Thank you for calling E-Nonymous, this is Jeremy.” He noticed his hand trembling on the mouse as he tried to navigate the cursor, causing it to zigzag across the screen.
He couldn’t have asked for a better debut call. The man on the other end had called in to ask about his bill. It proved a simple task, with just a couple clicks to get to the correct screen. The call took all of two minutes before the customer hung up, satisfied.
“Good job!” Roberta said, scooting in to help Jeremy log his call. “You sounded shaky at first, but clearly you know what you’re doing.”
“Thank you,” he replied. “Was that a pretty standard call?”
“For the most part, yes. There will be varying degrees of difficulty; that was on the easier side.”
Roberta guided him through filling out his case, and he felt the nerves settle down. The first call was out of the way—before everyone else in the training class.
She may be a bit different, but Roberta just helped me get a leg up, he thought.
Jeremy took four more calls before their time on the floor ended and they trickled back to the training room, where Jason sat at the front desk, hammering away at his laptop.
“So how did it go?” Jason asked once they had all returned.
“Jeremy over here was taking calls already,” Kristan said sassily.
“Oh, really?” Jason raised his eyebrows as everyone turned to Jeremy. “Tell us about it.”
“It was good,” Jeremy said. “Roberta handed over the headset and let me go at it. I talked with four customers and they were all polite.”
“Very nice!” Jason said enthusiastically. “How about everyone else? How did the call listening go?”
They went around the room, each sharing stories of the calls they had listened to. The mood was relaxed as they all laughed and shared their stories, as if they were lifelong friends chatting around the campfire.
Jeremy knew one thing: he would do well at this job. With his experience from the Bears, he had no doubt he would have a long and successful career with E-Nonymous.