Five Things To Know Before Taking a Job in a Call Center
First, a bit of background.
I had a hard time finding a job out of college. I did such exciting things as data entry, administrative work in an office (as a man), and my favorite, stacking heavy cement tiles in a cold warehouse.
Eventually, I got a job in the call center of a mutual fund company. This was in 2008. I bet you can guess how much fun that was…
Long story short, I hated it. Not knowing any better, I stayed for years. I was fired when things got less busy, and brought back when calls picked up again.
I was cursed at, threatened, insulted, and had little old ladies crying into the phone because they lost their life savings.
I dealt with the worst of the worst of corporate complexity and power-tripping micromanagers.
I stayed way too long. But eventually I learned something from it.
And the experiences I had there, looking back, were essential to developing the unique approach to customer service that now serves me so well…
That said, here’s what you should know before taking a call center job.
- Customer service is broken. Especially in big companies. The kind of companies who still use call centers. The call center is an inefficient and ineffective relic of a past era. It is usually one of the worst ways to resolve customer problems. As a lowly call center worker, you will quickly realize all of this and more if you’re smart. And you may be tempted to try to do something about it.
But that’s not what you were hired to do. You were hired to be a meat-based robot, a warm body, an ass in a chair.
You’re there to repeatedly “handle” simple issues that could and should have been prevented, in the way you’re told to handle them. Check your human reasoning at the door.
- Metrics are not reality. They’re created to represent reality, but in the minds of the micromanagers, they quickly replace reality. This means that when a conflict between, say, satisfying a customer’s need and “hitting the numbers” arises, the numbers will always win out. Efficiency is measured in calls per hour, for example. More calls per hour is better. In reality, if nobody called, that would be a GREAT day. No customers are having any problems.
But the numbers would say that was highly inefficient, and people would lose their jobs.
This kills any incentive to prevent customer problems before they happen. It actually incentivizes forcing more people to contact customer service for routine issues.
You, as the call center worker, will be on the front lines of this ineffectiveness.
- Customers hate you, but it’s not personal. Remember, as a call center worker, you’re part of a big, shitty, broken machine. Churning out activity without any regard for its actual value to the business, the customer, or anyone else. This business likes to force people to pick up a phone and call someone. No email, no live chat, no respect for their customers’ time. They’ve waited on hold, listening to terrible music, BS corporate slogans, repeated calls to log into the website that can’t handle what they’re calling about, and reminders that “your call is important to us.”
They’ve pressed 47 for English. They’ve talked to a voice recognition system that said “sorry, I don’t understand” over and over again.
Minutes, sometimes hours of their precious time has been wasted, all for a simple issue that should have never happened in the first place.
After wading through all this unnecessary complexity, They get through to you, the level 1 call center ass in a chair (real term in the industry).
You enter into your poorly written, company mandated call script, because the boss is listening, and this poor bastard erupts at you.
He just wants to have his problem solved, and you’re going on about how you’d love to help him today, how sorry you are he’s having trouble…
You’re not a person anymore, you’re just the face of the company he now hates. So you get to deal with his anger.
- You are being watched. They’re recording your calls. A team of nerds will nit-pick over every word you said or didn’t say. Your boss will threaten you regularly with termination about any “mistake” you made. Emotional abuse is the standard means of control. Your comings and goings are tracked. 3 minutes late? That’s a write up!
They tell you when to eat. Your piss breaks are timed.
You, perversely, learn to love meetings, the biggest waste of time on earth. Not because they’re valuable. They’re not. But because they get you off the phone for a while.
You begin to dread that “ding” in your ear that means another angry customer is on the line.
- It’s not going to get any better. You get depressed. You read the self-help books. You try to be positive, optimistic. It’s not so bad, you say. Maybe you’re just overreacting. Maybe you have a bad attitude. You’ll get a promotion soon, or a pay raise. Your boss will realize how smart you are and treat you better…
Don’t count on it.
The call center is where intelligent, ambitious people go to rot. It will kill your motivation and your dreams if you let it.
I’m not just being dramatic. These jobs get you thinking that you can’t do any better. The phrase “at least you have a job” is used a lot.
It will trap you forever if you let it. Some people have the benefit of a hot temper. They get mad one day and quit. I wasn’t so lucky, and it almost destroyed me.
One way or another, you need to get out. Associate with better people. Keep learning, improving, trying things.
Learn what you can from this job, but don’t become the job.
See firsthand, as I did, how complexity and a complete lack of skin-in-the-game has turned something as simple as customer service in the MONSTER it has become today.
Let this experience guide you going forward. In terms of what kind of work you do and don’t like doing. But also in terms of how to (or how not to) manage people, departments, and businesses.
Remember the above points, and you might eventually see your call center experience as something valuable.
Is working in a call center necessary, or even recommended, to learn these things? Of course not!
If you can avoid it, for the love of god avoid it.
Those years in the call center, and in other similar jobs, were some of the most (professionally) miserable in my life.
Good things still happened, I don’t want to be all doom and gloom. I met my now wife in that call center.
But most of all, the experience had such an impact on me that it changed the way I see customer service forever.
So a few years ago, when I was hired to run customer service for James Altucher’s (then) independent newsletter businesses, I knew I had to do things differently.
They were just getting started, but starting to make a lot of the same conventional mistakes I talked about above, just at a much smaller scale.
My job was to prevent and reverse that. I took it as a challenge to reinvent the way customer service should work.
To prevent unnecessary complexity at all costs, and to focus almost exclusively on the few things that matter most.
Pure, ruthless 80/20.
It took a lot effort, and trial and error, but eventually I came up with an approach that works.
It’s not a conventional approach. It brutally slaughters a lot of the sacred cows that the industry has been mindlessly worshiping for years.
But it also works. It makes customer service basically run itself.
And it turns customer service into a profit center, not just a cost.
I’m working right now on a guide to help businesses do what I do.
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