Technology

In one way, I'm happy this is happening, in another way, I'm not - I've given well over 2 decades of my life to the call center way of living. Let me give you a sneak peak into what really happens in the daily life of a call center worker.

• You live by the time on your telephone, it's your punch in and punch out system in most centers. Don't clock in more than 8 or 15 or whatever insane metrics they set past your clock in time else you will be considered tardy. This includes all breaks and clocking out.

• If you are a first contact person and taking phone orders, your 'talk time' is measured. Anything more than the standardized 5 or 6 minutes is considered excessive and they tell you to move the calls along faster.
  If you are customer service, your talk time is loosened but you are also the first and last contact the customer should have for the issue.

• Your phone calls are monitored and/or recorded (For Real!). If you are like me and hate to your your voice, woe be it to you when they play back your last call or two so you can hear yourself talking to the customer. If not recorded, then it is up to the monitoring person to be nice. You are then told what you need to do to speed up your talk time, or increase sales etc..

Telemarketing

Oh dear God, this is a life sucker and has the highest turnover on jobs. You quickly learn more about human nature in an odd sense. The sheer pressure on booking that next sale is insanely high and if you don't meet the sales minimums for the day or even hour, you are sent home without pay. I worked for a company which sold HR Manual trials, I was never more relieved and happy to be fired when I was for not making the per-requisite sales quotas for the half day.

TIPS

I don't think I've encountered a single call center rep in my years of service where a CSR decided that today, they would be a jerk. All we ever want to do is get through the day and earn our wages and go home.

One thing I will say with confidence, is everyone you work with has something in common, you aren't there necessarily because you enjoy it, you are there because it puts food on the table and beats living off of unemployment benefits. It's a thankless job.

If you receive great service from a call center rep (CSR) and are happy, politely ask to speak with their supervisor and when you do, be sure to leave them a good review. It doesn't always help to do this after a bad call, but sometimes rebounding to a new agent by calling the company back and asking for a supervisor will make a big difference if you take issue with them about the poor quality of service you received.

Remember, if you can't resolve an issue with a CSR, It's not always that they don't want to resolve the issue for you, their hands are probably tied and in fear of losing their job or being reprimanded, they simply won't budge.

Kindness goes a long way with us as well, if you are respectful and kind, we reflect the same back to you and often have tools at our disposal to grant you an extra discount and/or savings. We genuinely want to see you happy!

ON THE OTHER HAND

If putting AI in front of the call centers will help screen out the most common issues, then by all means do it. Also, if the stupid bean counters out there which insist of outsourcing to third world countries as it's cheaper, can find it to be more cost effective to use AI, and keep the jobs local to their country of operation, then I'm in favor of it.