About 10 years ago, after I finished university, I stepped out into the big wide world of employment and like many graduates strolled straight into a job at a call centre. I wouldn’t say it was exactly what I’d planned with my immediate life after Uni but bills needed paid and it wasn’t all bad. I fitted in fairly quickly as about fifty per cent of my work mates were either students or ex-students like me looking to make some easy money.
I won’t name names as to who I worked for but if I say it was a very (very) large telecommunications company within the UK, you can probably guess. Anyway, it wasn’t hard work and at first it was actually quite fun, but within about four weeks I soon started to realize that around half of my colleagues were either leaving or talking about leaving and within about four and a half weeks of starting I was thinking of leaving as well.
After the initial buzz of starting it was quite frankly- mind numbing. The same questions from callers about their bills, the same requests from management to improve our call times, the same complaints, everyday always the same. So I left, and got another job- in another call centre! At that point in my life I hadn’t twigged that it was the style of work that was bothering me, I had put it down to the fact that I was working for a huge corporation that held such a huge monopoly on the industry that it could do what it liked.
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So I started at a Bank, it was better money, I was on a proper contract (unlike before), and there were some great benefits for staff- bonuses, good deals on loans etc so I was drawn in- again. I remember at the time my brother telling me that call centres were the sweatshops of the 20th century and I took it with a pinch of salt, but now looking back I know what he was getting at. I worked the later shift, that meant I could be starting anytime from 12pm to 3pm and finishing anytime between 8pm and 11pm, “great” I thought- long lies! But what this meant was that I lived at work, even if I got up early, I would still just be waiting to go to work, then I’d finish work just in time for bed. True I still worked an 8 hour shift like anybody else but my 8 hours managed to take up the whole day.
Then there were the holidays, the company had come up with an ingenious way of giving you your holidays without it impacting on the business. If you wanted a holiday you had to book it in on the system and wait for approval, nothing unusual there. But the clever bit is that you could book a holiday for that afternoon if you wished, or that very evening. What ended up happening is that people who worked the late shift rarely worked a full shift as they would take an hours holiday here and there to leave early so they could be down the pub before closing. The holiday was only granted if the call levels were low enough, so it was great for the company too as they didn’t have staff sat around doing nothing and getting paid for it. The problem is that the employees were slowly using up all their holidays without realizing it.
I lasted at that job for around a year, left and took a pay cut in order to work in retail, meet people and adjust back into society again. The main problem with the call centres that I worked for back then is that they were too big, you were only ever a cog in a huge machine and you knew it. I’m sure the callers to these companies knew it as well. I’m not saying that all call centres are horrible places to work, far from it; inbound call handling centres work very well if they are on a scale that employees can still feel valued as they in turn will pass that feeling onto callers. I’ve worked very closely with smaller call centres since that time and very much feel this is the way to go. The real proof for me is to look at the employee turnaround; small call centre equals small turnaround of staff. What this in turn means is that staff are likely to be better trained, better acquainted with callers and in the end happier at work.
Elliot Young has worked in the telecoms industry since 1998 and has seen how call handling services have evolved over this period. He now helps small, medium and larger businesses to properly manage their calls.
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