I've been with the company over 10 years with the internal helpdesk known as the ITHD/NSC/LSC/ITSC, you name it. 5 years ago we had over 200+ young technicians learning and improving and supporting various commercial clients that made Verizon Business a lot of money. In a rare instance, the helpdesk was actually turning a profit.
We supported JetBlue, Acosta, Dunkin Donuts and many other clients. We grew, we expanded, we developed and made everyone a lot of money while doing so. Shortly after, a change was made in leadership and the decision was made to drop all external clients and "focus on Verizon first". This was heartbreaking for a lot of us and our clients as we had spent nearly a decade on some of them supporting them, doing on-call weekends, being involved in high level decisions, but business is business. We were told not to worry about work/call volume because we would be expanding our internal support so much.
Six months later, we lost about 40 techs. Most of the bad ones were taken in this wave, but also some good ones. A year later in November 2015, we lost all of Tier 1 Support. Over a hundred people were let go and VDSI took over every ounce of first level support, leaving only about 75 Tier 2 technicians there. Again, don't worry, internal support, too much at stake for them to replace you guys.
You know how this goes.
Six months later, another wave, then another, then another. Good techs, great employees shown the door and replaced by VDSI who wasn't even allowed to perform the same level of administrative troubleshooting that we were. Quality < Cost Savings. As of the end of June, there are less than 30 people there INCLUDING managers, quality assurance and leads, possibly less than 15-20 technicians who can handle actual complex issue while the rest of the tickets go to EUS (soon to be IBM) or India.
While it's been extremely sad watching a flourishing profitable department reduced to outsourcing and a virtual ghost town with fear as the main motivator, we genuinely enjoyed supporting you guys. Wireless, Wireline, commercial clients, I loved it all and would have gladly spent 20-30 more years fixing every problem you ran into. Many of you treated us very well over the years and we appreciate it very much, best of luck to everyone.