Competition time.

Having finally managed the settings, until this coming Thursday the Kindle version of Secret Diary of a Call Centre will be available for FREE. I really hope you enjoy the book and if you do then, please feel free to leave a review!

In conjunction with this I am launching my first competition. I have an original version of the above artwork (or rather doodle) – inked by me. To win this just answer the following

What reason do I give for having to be careful when discussing the last call centre I worked in?

To give you a clue it’s a piece of legislation.

the winner will be chosen at random. Answers to my email at diaryofacallcentre@gmail.com

CG

Diary of a Call Centre: Book of the Blog

Those of you following the blog may remember that a while ago I announced my intention to put together a book of the blog, and that I had indicated this would be available in October.

Well, October came and went, and so did November, but I’m pleased to announce that now, in December, the book of the blog is available via Amazon.

I’ve brought together the very best of the blog and some new material – including an account of my very first call centre job – all in one handy volume.

I really hope you all enjoy the book and check back here for future giveaways and competitions I will be running, as well as continuing to post my thoughts and and experiences of the call centre.

Thanks

Call Guy

How to complain to a call centre

At first glance call-centres and restaurants couldn’t appear more different, but the way I see it they’re really quite similar. Both feature itinerant workforces doing long hours with low pay running the gauntlet of dealing with the general public day in day out. Just take this article in the Guardian on how to complain in a restaurant. It could easily be wtitten about the call centre. In fact so much so that I’ve adapted many of the points as one thing I’m asked quite often is what tips I have for dealing with call centres.

Anyway, here is my adapted list for how to get customer service satisfaction:

Don’t call whilst drunk

Halfway through a bottle of wine is probably not the best time to call a call centre with that problem of yours and is more likely to end in confrontation than resolution.

Don’t ask to speak the the manager

The restaurant article makes the point that in the restaurant  bad service is usually down to poor management, training and recruitment, with staff being innocent victims caught in the crossfire. This definately does apply to the call centre where what agents can and can’t do is often rigidly defined…… by management. Added to the fact that in the call centre the manager doesn’t actually want to speak to you anyway so all you’re doing is messing up my hard-won call stats. Definitely don’t begin a call this way as it will just turn me against you

Make your point plainly and politely

This goes without saying. Quite often the agent knows what the problem is, even sympathises with you. Keep them onside and more they will do what they can to help.

Put yourself in their shoes

The trick here, according to the restaurant article, is differentiating between genuine rudeness and laziness and staff having a genuinely hard time dealing with a crisis, or a surge in demand. In the call centre this means don’t shout at someone because you’ve been hanging on the line for 40 minutes. They’ve probably been having the day from hell and as the article states “picking on people who are clearly having a hard time of it is tantamount to bullying.”

Don’t talk to people as if they’re idiots

In my call centre the chances were you were speaking to someone working their way to wards a MSc in biochemistry. Just because someone works in a call centre doesn’t mean they’re stupid.

The menu is not optional

Again, this applies equally to the call centre – in fact even more so. I once had a row with a customer because I couldn’t fit their greeting on an item within the space which the system allowed. They just didn’t understand that there was a character limit which was set in stone and thought that somehow I should be able to change this and that I wasn’t. Dealing with a call centre you really need to know

Know when to walk away

Sometimes, you will never get satisfaction. I’ve worked for companies which just did not care and would let customers throw themselves onto the rocks of frustration over and over. The customers clearly thought that in the rules of customer service land that something must give, if only their complaint would make it to the right person. This blind belief would lead to them spending hours on the phone, letter writing and emailing.

Anatomy of a Call Centre

I’ve had this diagram in my head for a while so I’m pleased to finally get it down in some form. It shows my view of how the call centre works, and my role in the whole process. My position is very much to counter the negative energy of the customers by diffusing and absorbing their anger (something Arlie Hochschild referred to as ‘emotion labor’) I’m  a conduit for the system, the agglomeration of software and procedures which governs each firms day to day operations and determines the form and limitations of our interactions – If the system won’t allow it it can’t be done. The system though can’t emote, and its apologies – if it could apologise – would be as unconvincing as those tinny automated announcements you get when your train is delayed and which make me wonder if the railway companies are engaged in a secret project to build a computer which is actually sorry for your delay. Until someone succeeds that project we have the call centre.

 

First taste of the call centre

It must have been sometime in the early nineties. My Dad had a business selling fresh cream cakes and these were particularly popular with offices where people would place bulk orders for birthdays and other special events. As the delivery boy it meant I’d seen the inside of many offices. This one was from the outside fairly unspectacular. It had a façade of yellow-ish stone and sat on the outlying part of the office district where a busy roundabout separated downtown from the down-trodden part of town. Next door was a derelict Victorian Gothic church which always struck me as a little creepy.

The inside was gloomier than the airy new buildings I’d been used to. This feeling of difference though did little to prepare me for what I was about to see. I was directed with my tray of cakes into the middle of a high-ceilinged room. All around me sat people in headsets, the nearest a smart-looking man pressed a button “Hello, Eagle Star Direct, how can I help you?” Then a pause, followed by “I’ll just put you through.” Then again “Hello, Eagle Star Direct, how can I help you?” a pause, followed by “I’ll just put you through.” And again. and again, and again. The repetition seemed endless. I watched and listened, transfixed. What was this place? I wanted to get out and couldn’t get rid of the cakes soon enough. As I opened the passenger door to the van and swung myself into the seat ready for my next office I made a mental note. I never ever want to work in a place like this.

Staff Turnover in Call Centres

This is something which has been in my head for a while and it’s quite an accurate summary of my current workplace where the huge number of people coming in the door is only matched by the number making for the exit. It’s a situation which is familiar to many call centres where high staff turnover is a almost a way of life – as I blogged about last year.

Call Centre Documentary: Help Needed

Towards the end of last year I was approached by Dragonfly Television, makers of’One Born Every Minute, who are in the process of making a new documentary series about complaints and customer service in  Britain.

Among other things they’re going to be featuring call centres and are keen to speak to people who have experienced a negative effect from working in the call centre:

We’re interested in showing just what the toll of being on the end of a barrage of abuse can result in, our episode is going to be surrounding utility companies and at the moment they seem to really be at the very forefront of people’s vitriol. So we’d like to understand just how the decisions that are made at an executive level can have a negative effect not only on the customer but also the call centre worker themselves.

If anyone is interested in sharing their story, please contact Jonathan.Skuse@dragonfly.tv

 

 

Fictional call centre characters #2 Vroom

Vroom’s Managerial Matrix

Book: One Night at the Call Centre by Chetan Bhagat

Name(s): Varun Malhotra/ Agent Victor Mell/ Vroom

Employer: Connexions (India)

A struggling outsourcer with a call centre in Guragong Connexions take calls for their one and only client the U.S firm Western Computer and Appliances. Call flow is however dwindling and the future of the firm is in question.

Vroom’s call centre journey:

Young and idealistic the college educated Vroom was originally working as a journalist, but took a job in the call centre due to the better money on offer. This choice is a constant source of tension for Vroom, who finds call centre work hard and though he tries to justify his choice by pointing out that with economic wealth comes greater power  he also reflects on the hollowness of consumer society and the relatively low wages of Indian call centre workers compared to workers in the West.

Finest call centre moment:

Without a doubt developing Vroom’s managerial matrix. In Vroom’s own words:

There are four kind of bosses in this world, based on two dimensions: a) how smart or stupid they are and b) whether they are good or evil. Only with extreme good luck do you get a boss who is smart and a good human being.

Worst call centre moment:

Routinely abused by rude, angry and above all stupid customers. Vroom’s worst moment comes when he receives racial abuse from a drunk caller leaving him visibly distressed, trembling and breathing heavily.

What does Vroom represent:

The tragedy of wasted talent. With his education Vroom could be a journalist making a difference in society, but instead he’s wasting this potential in the call centre. Vroom is also representative of the tensions of the outsourcing model where power lies with the big Western companies who profit by paying comparatively lower wages and with the Western consumers who act in an abusive way towards the virtually powerless call centre workers.

What is a call-centre?

It seems an obvious question, but for me the more I think about it, the less clear-cut it becomes  – just what is, and what is not a call centre? and do you have to be in a call-centre to have a call-centre job? Above all is there one single defining characteristic of the call-centre?

One of my first jobs was dealing with  the incoming calls for a department of a local council. There were two, sometimes three of us in the office and our job was to answer the phone and either take messages and put people through to our colleagues and people in other departments depending on the enquiry. It was a tough and demanding job, dealing with often distressed or angry callers, without having any real training in how to handle them, or any power whatsoever over the outcomes but I stuck with it as it was my first proper office job and I was eventually promoted to another role within the team at the time thinking  – quite wrongly it would turn out – that that was the end of me and the phone, but the thing was I never really thought of it as a call centre job – and I still don’t. Though in many ways it seemed to have the characteristics of a call-centre job – It was almost entirely on the phone with my working pattern dictated by the rhythm of the calls coming in.

A few years later when working in my last call-centre job, I reapplied for  my old role which had in the meantime been outsourced to a private sector provider. The surroundings had changed drastically. It was now the classic call centre – the one you see if you close your eyes and imagine a call centre –  with all the operators sat in rows wearing headsets and a display on the wall detailing the number of calls waiting. What had happened was effectively a centralisation of all the people who like me had been taking calls within departments across the council. They were still organised into different business areas, but they were now all under one roof and though the tasks were largely unchanged they had all become unambiguously call-centre jobs and the place was very definitely a call centre.

In defining a call-centre there are two considerations; the tasks of the job and the environment, but can there ever be exceptions to this? What if, for instance, by way of technology a call-centre was de-centralised with operators based at home taking calls and logged in to a system remotely, could it still be regarded as a call centre?  I would be inclined to say yes – so long as a final condition is met regarding the way in which workers are managed. In my old job my line-manager had been the department manager who managed a range of professionals and had little time for the specifics of managing my area. There was no specific monitoring regime, or call handling targets, but after the outsourcing the management structure  became much more specialised. There were team leaders, as well as managers, who were dedicated to managing the flow and handling of calls. New IT systems were introduced which monitored, logged and fed-back and the boundaries between specialist areas were being eroded, so for example one operator could one call about bin collections and the next about housing benefit, possibly for two different councils.

Out of the three elements, task, place and management it is therefore the third which is most important. The call centre comes into existence at the point where the job becomes not doing some other task, but rather becomes the taking, or making calls. Spatially cut off from the rest of an organisation monitoring and call targets become an obsession. It’s in the call centres DNA.

Combining work and play; Can working in a call centre be fun?

Watching the new BBC 3 series The Call Centre, the thing about it that gets me is how much fun the place looks, so much so that halfway through it had me thinking about emailing  the genial boss ‘Big Nev’ a copy of my CV. In just one episode there was a soap-operas worth of romance, plently of laughter and we were introduced to the house band whilst the trailer for the next episode promised even more fun with a glimpse of the bowl of alcoholic punch at the office party. So can the call centre actually be fun….

When you say call centre, you may imagine something like an old airctraft hanger, a grey industrial unit, or a generic glass and steel office block, none of which particularly stir the soul. You’re also likely to imagine an equally dull generic call-centre interior, where workers sit in rows of cubicles and the colour pallate consists of grey, grey, and more grey. Hardly fun.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Why not turn the office into a playground? I’ve heard of one office where a slide has been installed and all prespective employees are encouraged to have a go. Granted it’s not a call centre, but architectural design has been used to make call centres more fun, such as the Thomas Cook Call Centre in Peterborough which includes among its features beach huts and waves. Another Thomas Cook Call centre, this one in Falkirk, also shows what can be achieved just by ditching the traditional rows in favour of clusters and bringing a splash of colour in

Big Nev’s call centre  with it’s a house band and football team showed how fun could be integrated around working routines. There are also ‘motivational games’ based around sales targets like balls of steel where agents begin with five balls and gets to take one ball from another agent when making a sale , or pod wars where the agent making the sale gets to ‘sink’ another agent, but if all that sounds a bit rubbish there are the more illicit games which can be played in a call centre such as the hang-up race , word-sneak or call centre hold-em.

How about some good old office romance? This was certainly on offer in Big Nev’s call centre with office speed dating events and no small amount of flirting . According to one survey call centres are even  a hotbed of romance, mainly due to the young age range of workers who have a predilection for hitting the pub after work and though I didn’t see much in the way of romance in my place a friend who worked in a call centre belonging to a high-street bank did tell me about a male and female colleague who had a rendezvous in the disabled toilet.  Something surprising to me though is the finding that one in four workers reported flirting with callers – not much opportunity for that with my client base of angry pensioners.

For Big Nev making the call centre fun made sense as, in an industry notorious for high staff turnover, it helped with staff retention. So really it’s win-win, staff have fun whilst recruitment and training costs fall.

So why can’t the call centre be more fun?