Kristen Doerer
3 min read
In This Article:
This story was originally published on CX Dive. To receive daily news and insights, subscribe to our free daily CX Dive newsletter.
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Customer service employees brought a lawsuit against Wayfair, proposed as a class action Tuesday, alleging the company did not fully compensate them for the extra time they worked.
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The lawsuit, which was filed in federal court in Massachusetts, alleges Wayfair violated wage laws in eight states, including Colorado, Illinois, North Carolina, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Utah and Virginia. Wayfair did not respond to CX Dive’s request for comment prior to publication.
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Wayfair requires its remote hourly customer service employees to work a full-time schedule, plus overtime, but does not compensate its employees for all the work performed, the suit alleges. “Defendant requires their [customer service employees] to perform compensable work tasks off-the-clock before and after their scheduled shifts and during their unpaid meal periods.”
The suit claims that Wayfair’s policies prevented them from providing good customer service in the time they were allotted to work, and that they would often have to work overtime to keep average handle times low.
The suit alleges Wayfair instructed its customer service agents to be ready for calls by their scheduled shifts. However, they were instructed to only include the time they were fully prepared to field calls in their timesheets — even though employees would regularly spend between 10 and 15 minutes logging in before their scheduled time. Employees were also told they could not work overtime without explicit approval.
If a customer service employee logged into the phone system without booting up multiple computer networks, software programs, apps and phone systems, they would be unprepared to provide a positive customer experience — and penalized if they failed to uphold their metrics, the suit alleges.
Wayfair’s “performance metrics necessarily require that [customer service employees] be logged into all computer programs, applications and systems, and have all reference materials and available resources open at the time of the first call,” the suit reads.
Customer service employees often performed a few minutes worth of their job duties during their 30-minute unpaid lunch break and after their scheduled hours, too, the suit alleges.
Whatever the outcome of the lawsuit, contact center workers’ well-being cannot be an afterthought, according to Forrester principal analyst Judy Weader.
