Right now for those who have never experianced a callcentre it is unlike any other job you can think of. Firstly you dont interact on a face to face basis, and as they will tell you a lot depends on your tone of voice. The customer on the end of the phone only has your voice to go on, and if you get that bit wrong then as the song says "there may be trouble ahead..."
When you get into that trade, you realise that several things are different. First off is the fact that most callcentres are shit hot on timekeeping. From my personal experiance I know that they expect you there on the phone in available, pc on and booted up ready for that 1st call of the day by 9AM DEAD. (Or whatever your start time is.) No taking 2mins to zip to the coffee machine, no excuses about bad traffic on the road etc, you got to be ready to go by the time the company starts paying you.
If you are not ready then you will get a file note or some form of warning about being there to "provide customer service". Now get a few file notes(2-5 depending on the company) and you then go onto some "impovement program".
This is the 1st warning on the lines of, shape up or get lost. No point complaining about it, as thats how the business runs. They dont care if your bus was late, you were stuck behind a lorry or your cat exploded.
So you then start getting in early to avoid the improvement programs, or to get off one if you are on one already. Now I move onto the best part of this, a lot of companys have clauses that say that should you be on some development program due to being late, you shall miss out on bonuses and the like, and have pay frozen until you are off that and have been clear of a program for a set amount of time. (Yeah its a bitch, but as you are just a small cog in a corporate wheel you cant do anything about it.)IE No pay increase other than the basic annual increase for you.
Audits and call record. Yes part of the joys of being in the call centre world is that you are listened to. Dont bitch to anyone on the line be it an incoming call/outgoing call or even an internal call. Your boss may be an asswipe, make the mistake of calling him/her that on a call and you shall be summoned to the office at a rate of knots!
Another part of your job is that the company listens to you on the phone so they can check that you dont lie to customers, mis-sell them stuff and follow the FSA guidelines. Each company has its own rules on what it wants and mostly it involves follow the DPA, and be FSA compliant and sell the customer lots of our nice products.
Now mistakes are easily made, and this may seem cynical(and it is) but I know that when audits are done, they can be done in such a way as to mark down people who dont fit in with what the company wants. Can I prove that, no. But I have seen good people who are damn good on the phones getting marked down due to some personal gripe with a team manager that they dont get on with. I will also add here that I have seen some people who get on fine with the same manager make huge mistakes and those not get picked up. Of course the manager will argue if it comes to it that they "read the rules and interpretted them"
Next bit call volume. Now if you think you have been busy before, just wait till you get loose on the phones. In a lot of centres I have seen 13 calls waiting to be answered. So you get a call, deal with the query and then you make a note to do a chaser call to get that resolved, and dig some answers up for the customer. Er no. They end that call and now you got another customer in your ear with another query.
As for callbacks, yeah you got to do them, but when? Ask to come off the calls and its no way. No with 13 calls awaiting an answer, and its like that day after day after day.
Oh and just to cheer you up, if you dont do a callback or resolve a query completely and the customer complains then its your neck on the line.
What your call centre manager will infer if you dare question anything you are told.
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And lastly some weird pic from b3ta.
Posted by Hello
Ok and now a rant about the media. Found the pic on baking moonbats site.
If we had had the same gutless lefty shits in the media back in the 1940's this would be how they would have reported the war.
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