Life at a Call Center

“Thank you for calling               , my name is               , how may I help you today?” Ah, the life of a call center representative. It is a job that has its perks at times, while at other times can just be a hell hole you can’t escape. 

It seems like the world of call centers doesn’t really exist to the average person until you are someone who has worked in one before. Then it seems like every where you turn there is a call center in which you can apply to. Most of the time people who work in call centers have a tough time breaking the cycle of working at them. 

Inbound call centers can actually be a relaxed environment depending on what type of call center it is. The easiest would probably be a medical appointment center or simply the position where you take over the phone bill payments. Now if you work in sales or customer service, well that is another story. 

You get the caller who just can’t seem to understand their bill, wants to yell at you because for some reason they just can’t seem to understand that you really have no control over what they are yelling at you for in the first place or your the sales person on the phone who is working on minimum wage trying so hard to make the sale so you can get some commission on it. 

Most customer service representatives take up to one hundred calls a day. Sometimes more. While you may land a good paying call center job, most are on average at about nine or ten bucks an hour. It is also difficult to move up in the call center world. Most good positions are already taken and the average call center has a high turn over rate. Although most large companies will tell you that this in fact is not true. I can’t tell you how many call centers I have worked for where their golden line was the fact that they “cared” about their employees and the turn over rate was extremely low. What a line that was.

Besides the fact that you are taking call after call after call. Raises can be very low. I worked at a place where the raises where $0.20 a year. Yes, twenty whole cents a year. Wow, in five years of hard work I could have earned a full dollar more then what I had started at. 

I must say that along with the negatives of working at a call center, there are often many pluses. It is a good start-up job for a student. Hours are usually flexible enough where you can work around your school schedule, some call centers are even open 24 hours. Depending on the company you work for you may get a hefty product discount. For example if you work for a cell phone company you usually get a descent phone plan and sometimes even discounts with a local gym. Other centers hold contests throughout the year to help “motivate” you and the prizes can sometimes be worth trying for. Some could be of monetary value while others could be material things. 

I once worked at a call center with a daily bonus structure based on your calls per hour. If you were good at your job, you could make an extra hundred bucks a day. Other places have monthly bonuses based on performance, but in most cases I have found that aiming for these bonuses was tougher then it seemed. The company would always stick you in the end saying you didn’t make this requirement or do that requirement. 

It is unfortunate to see that now a days our call center jobs are being outsourced by an alarming rate. Not only is this frustrating to the American people who need jobs, but also to the consumers that have to call in and speak to a person in India who can barely understand them. Not to mention the long hold times or automated systems that make it near impossible to reach a representative in a timely manner.