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At mine if you display basic competence it means you get put into more and more lines of business while still making the same lovely $12.45 an hour. I work in six lines of business and am at this time the most widely cross-trained agent we have, but I make the exact same as some yokel on delivery status. The more lines of business you're in the worse your chances of getting an internal promotion to TL or workforce or what-have-you are, because they can't afford to take you off the phone. In the department I'm in right now we have four agents, and my TL flat out told us when a position opened up on workforce that we shouldn't bother applying because he wouldn't sign off on the necessary paperwork - he knows they would reject us outright.
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Oct 23, 2014 02:09
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ZeroDays posted:Maybe a call center lifer can confirm if that's a myth or not; namely, that the best agents get kept with the garbage on the frontlines, while the mediocre agents snag the off-the-phone roles. I did 9 years in the trenches and can confirm this was true for my center.
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Oct 23, 2014 03:17
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BlackIronHeart posted:I did 9 years in the trenches and can confirm this was true for my center. This is true even outside the call center.
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Oct 23, 2014 05:00
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We had a guy who made himself way too useful and they tried to gently caress him out of a promotion he was contractually required to get recently. Ended up forcing the company to promote/hire more people than they'd planned because they pulled that poo poo with a couple others also. Note: this only makes sense if you remember we're a union shop.
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Oct 23, 2014 17:37
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News: As of 11/1, I am reduced (along with the rest of my department, to 4 hours a day on the phone instead of 5. Normally, I'd be overjoyed. But, sadly, the phones are my favorite part of the job. The rest of it is mind-numbing processing, arguments over minute procedures that can get you smacked by a QA department that isn't even on the same page with each other, generalized office politics, and being talked down to by management and reps from the other site who handles what we do that think they're better than we are. We've lost 4 people in the last month. I've had a couple interviews elsewhere, but no luck. Think I'll keep trucking and applying. I will say being able to stick the words "risk analyst" on my resume has helped, even though my job consists of looking for flag on new accounts and manning a hot line to fix them.
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Oct 24, 2014 19:33
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CountOfNowhere posted:This is true even outside the call center. The military analogy is very apt. If people knew how most American branches of the military really worked... well, they would probably only enlist for the unusually high wages that are almost impossible to get in the civilian world. In the civilian world, I've noticed that you rarely get paid enough to deal with extremely stressful situations that you shouldn't have to deal with in the first place. I don't know what it is with civilians, but a lot of them seem to enjoy deliberately pushing peoples' buttons until there is a possibility of them getting murdered (maybe they don't understand that other humans can end their lives). And some of them do it on the phone, too. I mean, really, you're going to give someone your name and address, and then you are going to go out of your way to make them angry? I sometimes wonder if people would even notice if a call center worker actually became a serial killer and removed the more offensive callers from society. In all honesty, I find it shocking that more (fictional) serial killers aren't stereotyped as being call center workers. lurker1981 fucked around with this message at 03:20 on Nov 1, 2014 |
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Nov 1, 2014 03:15
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At my job I was riding the absolute razor's edge of our attendance policy until they found out I knew poo poo about excel which is apparently a rare skill in my company (which is definitely a small time operation compared to who some of you other dudes work for). So they told me "You'll spend half your week off the phones doing data-team projects but you can't miss any more days". Had perfect attendance for the first time in literally forever.
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Nov 1, 2014 03:25
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I'm starting a new job at a call center soon supporting devices for a certain fruit company. The pay is terrible, as in slightly above min wage, but I'm just happy to be able to have income to pay the bills. We were told that we will be recorded on and off calls, which is something new for me but shouldn't be an issue. My biggest concern is what kind of quota they have for sales and how they measure performance. I hate to be measured by things out of my control, such as meeting sales quota or the lovely CSAT scores. I'm still applying for help desk or maybe an entry level QA position. I'm hoping that being employed would increase my chances. The call center claims that internal hires are not rare so maybe eventually I can somehow sneak my way into their IT position. They also have a tuition reimbursement program so I may be able to pick up a few certifications while I'm there. For now I'm just going to enjoy the training period while I can.
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Nov 1, 2014 08:08
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Revalis Enai posted:My biggest concern is what kind of quota they have for sales and how they measure performance. I hate to be measured by things out of my control, such as meeting sales quota or the lovely CSAT scores. I wouldn't worry too much about this. After a couple of weeks, you will start emulating the behavior of your fellow coworkers, and no matter how wrong you think something is, how stupid you think it is, or how corrupt you think something is, you will end up doing it yourself because you can't risk being without a job. Say, for example, they say you have time limits on your calls. You will learn to find excuses to make sure your calls never go above that limit, even if there is a possibility that you could help the customer. Or if you don't have time limits, but you need to make a certain number of sales within the overall number of answered calls, you will learn to stretch things out so that you only end up taking 5 calls a day over an 8 hour shift. Even if you can't actually help the customer, you will find a way to stretch things out so you don't get stuck talking to another customer, and risk damaging your "conversion rate". With time, you will learn how to pad your stats while also accomplishing very little (sometimes I get the feeling that most companies don't actually care about providing good customer service). That is the secret art of being a call center worker. And if it is anything like most call center jobs, you could probably smoke weed or meth while on the clock. I've had quite a few coworkers that did that, and it was super obvious, and nobody in management made any attempt to fire them. lurker1981 fucked around with this message at 10:35 on Nov 1, 2014 |
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Nov 1, 2014 10:29
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lurker1981 posted:
Pretty much this. Back when I was a debt collector, one guy I knew kept a pint bottle of vodka at his desk, and would sip on it throughout the day. Management had to have known, but because he could pull in 10k a week in collections they didn't say a word.
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Nov 1, 2014 15:27
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lurker1981 posted:I sometimes wonder if people would even notice if a call center worker actually became a serial killer and removed the more offensive callers from society. In all honesty, I find it shocking that more (fictional) serial killers aren't stereotyped as being call center workers. My coworkers and I used to daydream about an episode of Police Procedural (take your pick) that would be about seemingly random murders until the nerdy-techie cop/agent discovers the link: The victims had all called the same company for support in the last 6 months and spoke to the same person!  This reminds me of a time when I was in a pod with a guy who was a 6'4" 300 pound biker with anger issues. He'd pound his desk, throw his headset against the wall, slam his chair into the desk, all kinds of aggressive poo poo after bad calls. He'd be constantly muttering under his breath while going out to have a smoke. My boss' boss pulled me into her office one day and asked if he made me afraid for my safety. I told her flat out 'No, not at all. I'm not the one harping on him to make his stats and sales.'. She didn't respond to that very well but I honestly believe any sort of workplace violence at any call center would be targeted at management and not the other poor souls on the phones. BlackIronHeart fucked around with this message at 01:54 on Nov 2, 2014 |
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Nov 2, 2014 01:47
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It's frustrating when my ability to actually help the customer conflicts with the metrics the company enforces, and this applied to all the call center I've worked at. When people don't want to buy poo poo nothing can change their mind unless you promise them the world, which is flat out lying and something I will never do. Apparently I'm the only Asian in the class. There's like only 2 blacks and the rest are white. I'm seriously hoping I can find another job that has better pay and doesn't have mandatory over time.
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Nov 2, 2014 01:48
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Revalis Enai posted:It's frustrating when my ability to actually help the customer conflicts with the metrics the company enforces, and this applied to all the call center I've worked at. Once your class gets out onto the floor, they will probably get rid of the mandatory overtime. However, you are getting the privilege of being able to work at a call center! What could possibly be better than that?  And... once 75% of your class quits, they'll probably be bringing mandatory overtime back. It's a win-win situation.
lurker1981 fucked around with this message at 05:29 on Nov 2, 2014 |
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Nov 2, 2014 03:05
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lurker1981 posted:Once your class gets out onto the floor, they will probably get rid of the mandatory overtime. Depends on staffing... Our center in Florida has been running 10+ hours/week of mandatory OT for several years now, and they have no plans of stopping. Must be cheaper than hiring.
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Nov 2, 2014 03:49
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you ate my cat posted:Depends on staffing... Our center in Florida has been running 10+ hours/week of mandatory OT for several years now, and they have no plans of stopping. Must be cheaper than hiring. Eh, they're probably just grinding you guys into dust...because they can. (And the folks in India are probably getting paid more than you.) But there's no need to get upset about that. Remember that when we leave this mortal coil, we will go to Sugarcandy Mountain. In Sugarcandy Mountain it is Sunday seven days a week, clover is in season all the year round, and lump sugar and linseed cake grow on the hedges.   I really hated working in call centers. lurker1981 fucked around with this message at 05:40 on Nov 2, 2014 |
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Nov 2, 2014 05:16
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lurker1981 posted:I wouldn't worry too much about this. Nobody has ever been fired from our call center for reasons other than attendance, well until the last supervisor got a female coworker in an office and confessed his LOOOOVE for her while grinding against her. Clear sexual harassment will do the trick also. Metrics are absolutely 100% more important than anything else. One guy started geting dinged for aux time. So he answers calls non-stop like a robot. If they ask him to do anything at all, like hey call this customer back, he says "can't aux time issues" and they shrug. Nobody gives a gently caress. He 100% doesn't have to call any user back because they won't force him to use aux time. Funny poo poo.
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Nov 2, 2014 07:01
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My metrics just got screwed with pretty hard... Old metric: 5 hours on the phone, 15 minute break, 3.5 hours talk/waiting to talk to clients. New metric: 4 hours on the phone, no break (it's split between two two-hour shifts), STILL 3.5 hours talking/waiting to talk to clients. Which means our Wrap Idle goal (putting notes in, bathroom breaks, sending off necessary emails and making adjustments to their accounts without them sitting on the line) drops from 25% to 12.5%. To put that in context: most departments in the company are at 20%. My average, for the over 3 years since I started, in both my last department and this one, has been at about 18%. The department average right now is 23%. The weird thing about this place is that it has no real metric for Average Handle Time. Nobody will say anything to you unless you're a major outlier compared to the department average, though I've almost never seen that happen. My average handle time is about 9-10 minutes, including wrap/idle. The department average is between 10-11 minutes total handle time. The guy behind me has a 15 minute handle time, mostly because he has an uncanny knack of making the simple complicated. I wince sometimes at what I overhear. But his wrap/idle is 10%, because his calls run far longer, so he's safe. Even though I'm more productive, I'll be the one getting complained to by my manager.
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Nov 2, 2014 17:15
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blackmet posted:My metrics just got screwed with pretty hard... so you have to keep the customer on the phone while doing stuff to their accounts, email other departments etc. The guy I mentioned who has aux time issues will answer a call, ask them to hold, put them on mute (not hold) send off his email. If the customer hangs up, so be it. Doesn't count against him. There is something wrong with his numbers somewhere, he figured out to get his handle time right he had to go from like 40-50 calls a day to 70-90 with no use of aux time, no more than 10 minutes a day on restroom, and his 30 minute lunch to get about 65%. Barely above, like 68%. They can in no way shape or form explain to him how this makes any sense, even though he asked and they agreed he used 0 minutes of aux time in a week, and no more than 40 minutes a day bathroom/break he can't break 70% while nobody else has this issue. They just shurg at him and say "the engineer says its working correctly" Call centers.
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Nov 2, 2014 17:46
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At my last job, we had 30 minutes break time, 12 minutes to fill out timesheets, read emails, that sort of things, 6 minutes to shut everything down at the end of the day, and up to 5% "slippage time" which we didn't have to account for. In theory these times were spread throughout the day, but one of my co-workers figured that they just check the length of the time, not the actual times, so he would save it all up and just get off the phones about an hour before quitting time.
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Nov 2, 2014 18:18
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sullat posted:At my last job, we had 30 minutes break time, 12 minutes to fill out timesheets, read emails, that sort of things, 6 minutes to shut everything down at the end of the day, and up to 5% "slippage time" which we didn't have to account for. In theory these times were spread throughout the day, but one of my co-workers figured that they just check the length of the time, not the actual times, so he would save it all up and just get off the phones about an hour before quitting time. I used to do something similar in my last call center job. I started at 5AM so I would wait until 1PM to take my lunch and leave at 1:30. Took a while before they started giving me crap about it. Has anyone here actually moved up the ladder into a non-phone position? How did you do it?
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Nov 3, 2014 05:13
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How hard did I try to escape call center work? I separated with my wife. Haha. I mean, the separation was unrelated (relationship had run its course), but I told her all of that, she was kind of in agreement, we decided to take a break from each other and see what happens in the spring. I resigned from my call center job, packed my car, and drove home to Philly. I started looking for new work, and there wasn't really anything, also everything here was starting at $2.50 to $3.00 less per hour than my last job. So after about a week of searching, the HR dept from my last job calls me, and they're like, "well did you like working here?" and I kinda did, it wasn't terrible, 50 calls a day max, good pay/benefits, easy going. And they're like "Would you like to work from home?" So yeah, they just overnighted me a headset and phone and I just did my first shift today. It was... fairly glorious. Sitting on the couch doing call center work, my music light in the background, Netflix on for awhile on the TV. Kinda really the way to go if you have to do this job. 6PM rolled around, I just closed the window and took off my headset, home! This is where I'm at for awhile. Going to think about where I want to go and do, i'm sure school is involved in some way, but this makes everything ten times easier, at least to get established.
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Nov 4, 2014 00:39
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Revalis Enai posted:I used to do something similar in my last call center job. I started at 5AM so I would wait until 1PM to take my lunch and leave at 1:30. Took a while before they started giving me crap about it. I've gotten entirely out of the phones. I now make all the schedules, enter all the new agents into the scheduling system, have to communicate with India to get any new shifts made, deal with schedule changes daily and generally have a hell of a lot riding on my rear end. It's still a million times better than being on the phones. Got an office, I get to have my phone on the floor, I get to make actual decisions about how the business operates. And it all came down to a position in this department came up, someone asked me "you any good at excel?" and the next day I was responsible for 800 peoples schedules. It's really just a luck of the draw thing. they could have asked any other person around me, I just happened to not be on a call at the time.
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Nov 4, 2014 04:00
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TokenTrevor posted:I've gotten entirely out of the phones. I now make all the schedules, enter all the new agents into the scheduling system, have to communicate with India to get any new shifts made, deal with schedule changes daily and generally have a hell of a lot riding on my rear end. It's still a million times better than being on the phones. Got an office, I get to have my phone on the floor, I get to make actual decisions about how the business operates. I'm hoping to do something similar, maybe IT, but more likely I may go into quality since I do have some QA experience(non-phone related). If I get really lucky I might end up moving up to corporate.
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Nov 4, 2014 04:12
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Revalis Enai posted:I'm hoping to do something similar, maybe IT, but more likely I may go into quality since I do have some QA experience(non-phone related). If I get really lucky I might end up moving up to corporate. From what I've learned a vast majority of support staff is external hires. I can't say I 100% understand the reason but its very rare to see anyone start as an agent and end up as anything other than an agent.
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Nov 4, 2014 05:05
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TokenTrevor posted:From what I've learned a vast majority of support staff is external hires. I can't say I 100% understand the reason but its very rare to see anyone start as an agent and end up as anything other than an agent. Conversely, all the centres I've worked in or visited have the bulk of the scheduling and MI teams made up of ex agent. The place I'm at now has sort of made a point of it - they do SOME external hiring, but as the scheduling team services half a dozen different call centres they like to have staff from all of those centres working on the schedules, just to build up rapport and so the centres don't feel like scheduling is dictating stuff but working with them.
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Nov 4, 2014 10:30
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Revalis Enai posted:I used to do something similar in my last call center job. I started at 5AM so I would wait until 1PM to take my lunch and leave at 1:30. Took a while before they started giving me crap about it. I work for an insurance company and started as a phone representative in the department that deals with providers offices/hospitals when they call in to obtain patients benefits, did that for 2 years, and then got promoted to an area that deals with both the provider calls and member calls mixed in as well, it was within the same department just a different team... applied to be a Team Lead after 2 years of doing that, did the Team Lead gig for a year and a half and am now a Supervisor. I'll tell you one thing I have learned since I was promoted to being a Team Lead, there are nowhere near as many people that want to get promoted as you would think for anything internal. Most people get comfortable and are too scared to apply to anything for fear of rejection. We literally are not posting one or two promotional opportunities right now because there are no good representatives to pick from, we have a couple in mind for 5-6 months down the road, but it still continues to amaze me every time we have to interview how we can post something (say, a Quality Admin job) and we will get maybe 5 applications from the 35-40 person department, and of those 5, maybe 2-3 are serious candidates that have any realistic shot (Obviously, if your metrics are completely terrible, it's not worth applying.) Really if you can get in at an insurance company (or doctors office doing the opposite job, calling insurance companies to verify benefits) it's not a bad gig at all, we start new hires here at $35,000 a year on the phones. Even our member services area that just takes customer calls starts around $14-15 an hour, and if you work full-time you accrue even as a brand new employee 5.5 hours of PTO per pay period, which is over 3 weeks of PTO initially, along with 7 paid holidays off. *Edit - I was also able to get in here and progress up the ranks without a college degree, I am but a simple High School Graduate, and am now 31 with what hopefully will be a career. Everything we have says "College Degree Preferred" but you can still get in the door at these places without one. All about how you interview. DesolateRampage fucked around with this message at 21:35 on Nov 4, 2014 |
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Nov 4, 2014 20:48
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Loving Life Partner posted:How hard did I try to escape call center work? I separated with my wife. Haha. The clear answer is to get a PS4 or an Xbone and have a good time on calls. Plus learn to jerk it while talking to people
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Nov 4, 2014 21:24
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One of our classmates just found a better paying job. After I got home I immediately started looking for helpdesk jobs in my area and found none, great. I'm glad my employer won't be forcing me to sell anything, but it still doesn't change the fact that I want to be out of the phones ASAP.
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Nov 5, 2014 04:02
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Fil5000 posted:Conversely, all the centres I've worked in or visited have the bulk of the scheduling and MI teams made up of ex agent. The place I'm at now has sort of made a point of it - they do SOME external hiring, but as the scheduling team services half a dozen different call centres they like to have staff from all of those centres working on the schedules, just to build up rapport and so the centres don't feel like scheduling is dictating stuff but working with them. Well, let me clarify myself. Outside of Team leaders, very rarely is anyone promoted from within. Team leaders and THEIR supervisors are generally former agents. But any other management or support positions tend to be external. Facilities or IT or whatnot. But Team leads are almost ALWAYS agents that moved up.
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Nov 5, 2014 04:32
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Loving Life Partner posted:So after about a week of searching, the HR dept from my last job calls me, and they're like, "well did you like working here?" and I kinda did, it wasn't terrible, 50 calls a day max, good pay/benefits, easy going. And they're like "Would you like to work from home?" Working from home was so much better than reporting to the office. No depressing co-workers, no commute that can wreck your attendance stats--it's great! DesolateRampage posted:I work for an insurance company and started as a phone representative in the department that deals with providers offices/hospitals when they call in to obtain patients benefits, did that for 2 years, and then got promoted to an area that deals with both the provider calls and member calls mixed in as well, it was within the same department just a different team... applied to be a Team Lead after 2 years of doing that, did the Team Lead gig for a year and a half and am now a Supervisor. Does your company's name start with a T by any chance? I think I worked for this place a couple of years back. I know in my center, nobody applied because supervisors from other departments would outright laugh at you and make it pretty clear that they didn't respect you because you worked in the call center. The division between the call center and the rest of the company's employees was really stark--for example, call center employees could only use an employee lunchroom that was located at the opposite end of the building, even though a lunchroom was located a few meters away from most of our cubicles. This seems like a silly thing to complain about, but it was a big deal during the 15-minute breaks if you had to walk five minutes instead of two minutes to get to your lunch... I actually called the employee hotline to complain about the difficulty in promotion, because we were repeatedly told during the interviews that this was supposed to be a temporary position before moving up. That was a petty thing to complain about, but I was frustrated, so I figured I might as well. I got a non-call-center job at a different company not too long after that, but I'm told that about a dozen call center employees were promoted within the next 12 months, some of them into new supervisor-type positions that didn't exist before, and nobody understood the sudden change.
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Nov 5, 2014 05:10
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legsarerequired posted:Working from home was so much better than reporting to the office. No depressing co-workers, no commute that can wreck your attendance stats--it's great! Nope, different company... our company is run by HR/Legal and that's one of the best things oddly about the job, it's very stable. For someone to get let go here it takes a solid history or a pretty sizeable mess up. Company is based (as are most of the employees) in the state of Minnesota.
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Nov 7, 2014 00:10
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I forgot that I made a twitter account a long time ago as I never use twitter, but I took the name @telemarketer. Pretty fun to just search for people bitching at telemarketers and play along.
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Nov 7, 2014 04:32
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Revalis Enai posted:I'm starting a new job at a call center soon supporting devices for a certain fruit company. The pay is terrible, as in slightly above min wage, but I'm just happy to be able to have income to pay the bills. We were told that we will be recorded on and off calls, which is something new for me but shouldn't be an issue. My biggest concern is what kind of quota they have for sales and how they measure performance. I hate to be measured by things out of my control, such as meeting sales quota or the lovely CSAT scores. ACS/Xerox?
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Nov 7, 2014 05:34
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Found out the other day that I got accepted to train for a different department, as an Emergency Advisor. I work for a place that takes calls from vehicles. I'm beyond excited to be doing a different line of work, but I've also wanted this since day one.
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Nov 7, 2014 08:45
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Thought this was fitting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpLEcLS_uiw
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Nov 20, 2014 06:24
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Harminoff posted:Thought this was fitting. With the turnover rate in call centers, instituting that is drat near impossible, especially when it's low level stuff.
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Nov 20, 2014 21:25
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Gothmog1065 posted:With the turnover rate in call centers, instituting that is drat near impossible, especially when it's low level stuff. I think it would boost morale. I know I, personally, would get a kick out of the puppets, and I'd be more likely to listen to them than some dumb team lead. As long as they switched up the funny voices a bit, it'd work. Puppets are the poo poo.
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Nov 20, 2014 21:59
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ZeroDays posted:I think it would boost morale. I know I, personally, would get a kick out of the puppets, and I'd be more likely to listen to them than some dumb team lead. As long as they switched up the funny voices a bit, it'd work. Puppets are the poo poo. Well, management are puppets. It's like a puppet chain of people with their hands shoved up their subordinate's asses. But they're not felt and goofy looking.. well some of them are..
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Nov 20, 2014 22:03
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Most managers at the two call centers I had the pleasure of working at were rather funny looking. Not all, but a lot. *Shocking* what a crap diet and sitting on your rear end for 9hr a day plus all evening does for someone.
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Nov 21, 2014 02:14
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I'm getting paid time and a half right now to sit on my couch and take one call every 20 minutes. I think I finally found the call center job that doesn't suck you guys.
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Nov 23, 2014 15:57
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