Anyone work at Walgreens Call Center?

kincaid wrote:

I just went for an interview today at a staffing place and they set me up for a job interview with the Walgreens call center. The only information I know about the job is trying to convince Walgreens diabetic customers to switch to their medicine. Is this what everyone else's job entitled?

Kincaid,if you don't mind, please tell me which staffing agency is placing people for them. I would really appreciate it. I walked in there last week and the receptionist @ Walgreen's call center told me that they were not hiring then but to keep my ears open because when they hire they hire in classes, so they can train all the new employees at once. If I need to go to a staffing company, I will. Any help you can give me will be greatly appreciated. If you feel more comfortable you can send it to my email. If that's the case, please let me know and I'll post it to you. Thanks..

Wannawork,
Can I ask you where you are from because it might vary in each city. I know that I went to careerbuilder.com and entered my city and that was one of the jobs that showed up.

Muscle Shoals, AL

kincaid wrote:

Wannawork,
Can I ask you where you are from because it might vary in each city. I know that I went to careerbuilder.com and entered my city and that was one of the jobs that showed up.

Muscle Shoals, AL

The staffing place I went through is called Staffmark but again it might vary from city to city.

good luck if you are hired in as a temp @ the call center I was not hired in as a temp, however, I watched as they used people for the 90 days then laid them off real easy, or even way before the time it takes to go from temp to reg employee. also the supervisors at the muscle shoals facility are insufferable there are maybe two or three that are actually not "bat$hitcr@zy" I believe the object of that place was: to get the callers off the phone asap, use a script that makes no sense, be polite as possible while doing so, and work with the technology from 5+ years ago then good luck, they pay really great starting out well i'm sure the pay the temps crap at first but if you can handle the mental abuse and side step all the BS and live with yourself knowing that you are trained to not fully help someone...

...then go for it. you will appreciate your next job after the call center like it's your dream job

To Kincaid - Staffmark is in a different city than me. Or have they sent you to the Muscle Shoals facility?? Thank you for your help :) Good Luck to you...

To Worked there 3 years- Thanks for your input too. I have experience in customer service so I don't think the unstables would bother me. Where did you get an interview? Don't get me wrong, the ones that are nuts will bother me, it will just roll off my back. I've worked in places with similar sounding supervisors. The stories I could tell.lol... now there's a great topic.. lol.... Thanks again to the both of you.

I've worked at the Muscle Shoals call center for over 2 years now, and I am leaving soon. This job isn't for everyone -- let's get that out of the way, first thing. The pay is good for the area, at around $10.00/hr starting off. Training takes around 2 weeks to complete, then you are in "nesting" for 1 week where you take calls while helpers walk around to answer questions, then you are set loose on your own and placed on any given supervisor's team.

The group managers, supervisors and Human Resources representatives can be suspiciously apathetic to your personal problems, and that can make them seem harsh. Another thing is, their overall rating is determined by how well you do, as an employee, so that is why they crack the whips. There are 3 things that you need to maintain at the call center: adherence, compliance, and quality score. Adherence involves your schedule, if you are auxing (another way of saying, turning your phone off to incoming calls) so that you can use "Personal Time," you are out of adherence. You are generally permitted 25-30 minutes of unauthorized aux-time before the supervisors will even say anything to you. Compliance is violated when you dress in jeans on a day that requires casual dress, or smoke on the company grounds, or are caught leaving the property on a break instead of lunch. Quality score is the overall rating you receive from your calls, and it goes from 0.0 to 3.0, 2.5 is the expected rating and it is REALLY easy to get a 3.0 on each call.

So, as someone who has experience in customer service, this is all going to seem like common sense to you. 9 time out of 10, you are getting 40 hours a week here (the end of the year is slow, so they do mandatory early release from Oct. to Dec. but this usually only amounts to 10 hours lost off your check.) There are opportunities to grow here, but do be aware: the management has shown themselves on numerous occasions as fickle and unreliable, but only in a few cases. Some supervisors will play favorites, some will stick to the book, so if you are good at making friends and aren't afraid to kiss a little butt here and there, this place will be the best shot you have in this area.

Hope I helped, it seemed like no one was willing to give any exact information and I know how frustrating that can be when seeking out information for a job. To apply, go to Sheffield in the plaza with Mcdonald's in the front, and apply at the Career Center there. You will be called soon, since they always hire more people for the beginning of the year. You'll take a typing test and have to meet the oh-so dreadful limit of 40-words-per-minute. It's so easy, it's laughable. Good luck and I hope you have a great experience, there.

I am just back from Iraq and looking to suprise a freind. I know he works at the Walgreens call center in Muscle Shoals. I can't find the address anywhere.

This was one of the worst places that I have ever been employed at. I agree with everyone above. The supervisors are assholes. This place is so strict. This was the only job available at the time. Their turnover rate is horrible. Their HR department are a bunch of morons. Their training department was actually pretty decent, though. Training did not prepare me for the actual job though.
If you're looking for call center work, I would recommend searching for "virtual call centers". They do exist (I work for one!) I get to troubleshoot internet in my pajamas!

Jay wrote:

This was one of the worst places that I have ever been employed at. I agree with everyone above. The supervisors are assholes. This place is so strict. This was the only job available at the time. Their turnover rate is horrible. Their HR department are a bunch of morons. Their training department was actually pretty decent, though. Training did not prepare me for the actual job though.
If you're looking for call center work, I would recommend searching for "virtual call centers". They do exist (I work for one!) I get to troubleshoot internet in my pajamas!

Would you please email me with the virtual call center you are talking about or where to find them. I need a job badly and have had a lot of customer service experience. I would appreciate it beyond belief, my email is:curiousdee2005@aol.com. Thanks!!!

It is great pay, great incentives, supervisors, managers are great a strict attendance policy but so? Like working here very much

Walgreens Call Center in Muscle Shoals is not that bad. The pay is up to par for the area, and management and the HR department will work with you within reason. It's not a bad place to work for, and you can really learn valuable skills you can take with you for the rest of your life. However, it is not for everyone. It takes dedication, compassion, and a whole lot of thick skin when you get a call from someone who is having a frustrating experience with our company. We have a "strict" attendance policy that allows you to accumulated up to 40 unexcused hours before you are terminated (this usually resets every 2 years). This is on top of 6 sick days for every year worked plus vacation time. You can apply for FMLA and Leave of Abscence as well. Take what you want from it, but most people who have been there for a while are relatively happy with their job.

I was employed by the call center when it first came out almost 7 or 8 years ago. When I came out on the floor not even the first section of the building was filled out, lol. After reading some of these comments, it looks like things have taken a nose dive. I would have made supervisor, eventually, had I stayed I think, but i moved on to bigger and better. I really loved the girls i worked with and the guys were pretty cool too. my supervisor, however, had some issues, lol. At the time, it was one of the best paying jobs out there and I was great at it. I still miss it. If you get employed there, make sure you memorize your employee handbook, it may make dealing with hr not so much of a hassle. I don't know who's there now, but when i started the staff was still pretty small so i guess we had a better relationship with hr and other staff. Once things got bigger, that ended and some of the drama began. I miss the old days of working there. It was a lot of fun. Sorry again to hear that it's gone downhill so badly. I loved working there despite some of the buttheads that were supervisors. that's life i guess...i've got a real peach of a super now *sarc*. lol

I do not work at this call center, but a local utility in Florida. First of all you should say do any of you work there, not does any of you, that may count against you when you apply for a job(s). Working in any call center is very stressful, the customers are rude, nobody knows the policies/rules/guidleines, they keep changing them on you. You have to work all kinds of days/hours/shifts, they have you timed for each call you take, deadlines to make, etc. Only apply at a call center if it is your last resort.

Trine wrote:

Hi all, I may be applying for a job at the Walgreens Call center sometime in the near future. Does any of you work there? I was wanting to get some idea of the environment, and what kind of place it is to work.
Thanks for any information!:)

I recently got hired with walgreens do you really take a test at the end of the training?

Anyone know where the walgreens call center is located t in Orlando,fl?

Does anyone know what the starting pay is at the Muscle Shoals Call Center for Walgreens???

This is how Walgreens CPO (Central Pharmacy Operations) operates: Management is marginally educated (or "zero" education). No formal pharmacy sciences education. No formal management education either. CPO was created from US Sprint marginally educated management (from a extreme-management-decay phone company specialized in call centers). The system is US Sprint applied to pharmacy business ( in a daily experimental laboratory where you are the lab mouse). In more details, and for you to get the idea, the CPO fills prescriptions based on metrics productivity. In other words, the revision of prescriptions are made strictly in metrics determined in seconds. For example, a prescription is entered in 40 seconds by the technician (that is not a licensed technician) and later check by the pharmacist. The pharmacist checks the data entry of the technician (entered in 40 seconds), and only have 12 seconds to check for errors. Once this "check" is completed, it moves to the last "check" for clinical interactions. This check is conducted in 4 seconds. Remember that it takes 2.5 seconds to normally blink the eyes, so the time remaining for the eye is actually 1.5 seconds to check for clinical interactions. To all this, Walgreens claims that their "check system" is perfect and very "modern" and "safe" for the patient. You get the idea?. This is the Walgreens CPO!. Now, if you are assigned to the call center section called PCC, this is basic telephony and metrics. Avaya system telephony adapted to a pharmacy (PCC or patient care center). This how this patient "care center" works: you have about 75 seconds to talk to patients (or inbound callers) calling you. The call is routed to technicians and to pharmacists. You will be the "specialist" as they will call you. You will be a machine and not a person. They will treat you as a machine. Your trips to the bathroom is timed in seconds. It is determined the exact time that takes you to normally walk to the nearest bathroom. It it takes longer you will have a demerit. Demerits points are assessed twice a week by a team leader that will call you twice a week to check your progress. You have to repeat the name of the patient at least 2 times. If you only repeat the name of the patient only once during the phone call, you will get a demerit for not repeating the name twice. The metric system is not targeted to make you more productive, or to serve better the patient, but is targeted to make you a human machine without human needs. This is the CPO of Walgreens. More details will be posted here later......

When you start working for the Walgreens CPO, do the following: For those claiming to be pharmacists, please check the Florida MQA license search in Google search engines. Type the name and last name of each "pharmacist" group manager or supervisor. You will be surprised the disciplinary actions records posted on their licenses by the state of Florida. One of them, even was a drug dealer that even was suspended for 2 years from practice, and received the licensed back with restrictions. Any pharmacy management role was also restricted by the Board for this particular person. And this "pharmacist" is a manager at the CPO! Get the idea? Another manager claims to be RPh, but the license was suspended and revoked since 1999? For chemical dependency! Licensed was never reinstated in this case, but this "manager" places an RPh after his name, even at his business card! Get the picture? Get an idea what the Walgreens CPO is? It is actually dangerous to be managed by this type of management! The sad part is that Walgreens is not able to find decent managers to manage the CPO. So they rely on pathetic career criminals to do the dirty job of an abusive, unethical, and customer unfriendly, discourteous and "multiple departure" (blatant deviation) from the pharmacy standard of care of pharmacy customers. CPO is a greedy and unethical scheme to shortchange services to Walgreens customers (with phony call centers) in order to optimize profits at the expense of the exploited CPO little employee ( or CPO human "machines"). The only explanation for Walgreens use of criminals in management roles is the criminality of their daily operations, that will require experienced and seasoned criminals for the role. Got the idea of the CPO?