Eon staff finish work at Rayleigh for the final time on Friday 25th June and are out of work from 1st July. An onlineFOCUS reader and Eon employee has sent us the following.
It?s been a really slow, long, lingering death for the staff there since the end of January as you can imagine. Eons expectation has been that everyone should carry on as normal with Business as Usual. With less staff (because some have been lucky enough to secure new jobs) call volumes sometimes have been much higher than usual ? who knows where the calls will go when Eons biggest UK call centre actually closes this coming week?
Staff don?t know where the calls will be going and the new Centres of Excellence that Eon have established seem to be incapable of dealing with the call volumes or the type of work ? there?s been a sharp increase in the number of internal calls to Rayleigh over the last few months asking them to resolve issues or tell staff in other sites how to do things. I know many of the managers are very interested to see if it does (as we expect become a minor disaster for Eon) from June 28th when Rayleigh is no more.
The extra work that Rayleigh have completed seems to be unrecognised by the Directors and may well come to bite Eon on the butt in the future. It will certainly be interesting to remain in contact with colleagues still there to see what the short and medium term effect is.
It was rather galling to find out that despite Eons Clean Utility cost cutting programme they have made a U-Turn this week and agreed to sponsor the FA Cup for another year at a cost of ?10m but not keep a site who handled the most calls, completed the most cross-sales and had the most efficient call stats and then to close them all for the sake of geography.
Good luck everybody…..
Feel so sorry for all losing their jobs at EON and hope this last week there is not too painful.
It might, though, be a good enough time to remind all who have been employees there that the job club, ‘Skills@StNick’s’ is still up-and-running as we recognise as a church community that plenty of people could well value a helping-hand with revising CVs, practising interviews or navigating the other processes a period of new job-hunting entails. Do please pass word around to anyone who might value such friendly help that St Nick’s (church), Church Road, Rawreth (just around the corner from EON Rayleigh) is open each WEDNESDAY EVENING, 8.00-9.30pm. Just come along!
Go well,
Paul (parish priest, St Nicholas, Rawreth)