Call centre jobs, your views.

shaz77_2

I'm interested in what opinions people on this board have on call centres, are they really a sustainable form of employment?

I know several in my area that specialise in selling car/house/commerical insurance etc but considering that consumers can generally make and buy their quotes on the Internet I am curious to know how long this type of employment will last for.

CFC

There will always be call centres in the UK. They won't be going away, and many of the companies that outsourced to India are bringing jobs back again.

Sales/telemarketing centres face more challenges these days but most call centre work is inbound.

Becles

I briefly worked in an outbound call centre, and I hated it!

The main reasons were:

- being tied to the desk

- repetition of saying the same script over and over again during a shift

- targets, targets, targets and pressure to hit them

- little chance of social interaction with colleagues


Once you get the headset on, you're stuck at the desk until break time or your shift ended. It meant you were stuck in the seat in front of a screen for up to 3 hours at a time.

The script got boring as you knew what was coming next. After saying it thousands of times, it was a real effort to put enthusiasm in it.

I wasn't too bad at the sales targets and usually hit them. It was the average customer talk time that I suffered badly with. We were supposed to keep each customer on the phone for an average of 5 minutes, which is a long time when people don't want to speak to you. When people said they were having their dinner or bathing the children or whatever, I was too conscientious to keep them on the phone, so my average talk time was too low.

Although there was a big emphasis on team working, because you are on the phone all the time, there was never any time for social conversations, so there was no chance of really getting to know people on the team. It was more just quick conversations with people before starting work or over a quick cuppa on tea breaks.

I also didn't like having to put up with abusive customers who didn't want to be called. Some of the swear words and threats used were quite upsetting. The worst was having us ring round an army barracks during a big rugby match, so we all got a load of abuse from drunk soldiers

marcellep

I worked in a call centre for 2yrs and loved it, it was a friendly place, family friendly, well paid, look after its staff, good mix of people and had plenty parking.


I do not have anything bad to say about call centre's from my experience, I work for an insurance company and I now work in a contact/control centre for the ambulance service. Ok the ambulance service is different from the insurance company, but its still very friendly, I know it might sound stupid but people at my work feel like my second family.....

Before taking any call centre job I would always ask if I could spend a few hrs with the staff, then ask lot's of questions.

Hope that helps

Cute_'n'_Quirky

I have friends who have worked in call centres for years and have no problem with them.

A lot of jobs in this life are repetitive, can't see how this is any different.

olly300

I've worked in two call centres doing different forms of work.
Strangely I was "management" before I was "staff".

One was a management type of job which involved ensuring that the right number and trained people were available at certain times this included arranging overtime. I also had to check that employees where not taking extra breaks, doing their work and arrange holidays.

I hated spying on employees like staff who had taken too many breaks for not good reasons i.e. seeing someone who came in with a baby got in trouble from my statistics. (I also got told off twice for not highlighting that two people had done this as it was an inbound call centre.)

Most of the staff where hard working, friendly and doing this to make ends meet. However it had a high turnover rate as :
1. The staff couldn't control the call flow and worked doing the same work day after day.
2. The office was a large open plan office with no privacy
3. It was in the middle of a business park which was empty at night in a dodgy area.
4. Had to write down everytime they had a break and the reason
5. Where openly spied upon by myself and other management.
6. Where given the usual s*** about team working

The other job was outbound calls selling stuff i.e. magazine subscriptions and doing surveys. I dialed the numbers myself but unfortunately the computer system the company used was useless. So for subscriptions even if you recorded a valid reason why someone didn't want a subscription you could end up ringing them or your colleague next to you would 2 weeks later. (Yes we could actually talk to each other between calls.) The most upsetting for me was ringing people again and again whose subscriptions had stopped because the relation was dead.

You did have an unwritten selling target for subscripton and sales but how the manager dealt with you depending on your call rate and how polite you were to customers. So if you had a high call rate where everyone put down the phone on you you weren't penalised, there as if you didn't make enough calls it was noted and if you continually did it you were encouraged to leave.

Staff worked in the smaller place for longer even thought the money was less as:
1. The office was divided into rooms.
2. You could dial your own numbers if outbound, or press a button to answer the next person in the queue if inbound
3. Targets were unwritten and there was only one person spying on you who made it clear when they were listening to people.
4. The work was more varied and you didn't have to read from scripts
5. You could go to the pub with colleagues as it was not located in the middle of a business park
6. You were not given the usual s*** about team working. The company tried to employ people in groups of 5-10 and get them started at the same time in the same office therefore trying to make a more natural team.

lynzpower

Ive worked in a few different call centres in my time.

I have worked for BT calling outbound, and worked for them on inbound as well ( chargecard helpline, moving house helpline) I worked on quantumn gas cards briefly. I worked for what-was NTL as well.

I personally really liked the work, I dont find it "demeaning" to help people and find it strange others do.

It is much better paid than some other "service jobs " shop work/ waitressing/ bar work etc. Some include bonuses as well, so if you sell that flight/phonepackage/insurance then you make a little extra. there is usually plnety overtime if you want it too.

Most jobs Ive done involve being tied to a desk and repetitive, I agree, I dont see why call centres are any different.

I was making in excess of 400pw part time for BT as a student, the best paid job i ever had - If I was doing 40 hours a week at that salary I would be making in excess of 41k now :rolleyes:

03022242

ok ive worked in 2 call centres, one was a leading service (cant say here what or which company although ...) provider which at the age of 18 i was getting paid £6.20PH, 3 years ago! BUT the job was absolute crap, i started with 60 people as the company was only starting up..

as the months passed most of the others left because the nature of the job, i lasted 18 months working there part time, and by the end i was taking up to 90 calls YES NINETY calls an hour... i told them i was leaving, they couldnt offer promotion as i was part time, even though alot of FT people who started after me did get it, i was 2nd best out of 1500 people at that stage, consistently!

so i left in the end, went to work in another call centre which paid £5.30 (18 months later then the first)! that was more relaxing, with few minutes between calls, and they also allowed us to view certain websites inbetween calls!

shaz77_2

Some good points raised.

My original point though was that the jobs that people have such as giving out quotes e.g. for insurance at call centres are going to be eliminated due to the fact that people can make their own quotes on the Internet.

Callisto

shaz77 wrote: »

Some good points raised.

My original point though was that the jobs that people have such as giving out quotes e.g. for insurance at call centres are going to be eliminated due to the fact that people can make their own quotes on the Internet.

There are a lot of call centres that will stay open, even if insurance ones (as per your example) did scale down/close due to the convenience of the internet. I'm currently working in an Inland Revenue call centre, and on the same business estate, there is an NHS emergency ambulance call centre. These places will not close as they're there for public benefit.

I must say though, that I never expected the pressure of targets when I took this job, but we are under more and more pressure to slash our call times to deal with more customers each day. How can we then give good service to customers calling for tax advice when we have less time to spend per customer? The management really have no idea and think we can answer sometimes complex tax queries in 4 and a half minutes or less... Morale is at an all time low, needless to say I am searching for a new job. The only good thing going for civil service call centre jobs is they are good pay, but even that is no longer enough to make me want to stay there!

Hapless_2

Just remember, if you end up telemarketing that you will get some nasty responses, especially if you call me (I am ex directory and TPS registered but many companies use old telephone books and are not TPS linked) as I detest marketing calls and am usually rude to people and demand where they got my number from.