a hundred to a hundred and fifty calls *per day*

Life Vero has posted something about the quality of non-face to face customer service. What she said isn't wrong but did inspire me to rant incoherently in the comments for a few paragraphs. The problem in these debates is that the human being within the call centre and their situation is often overlooked; that there might be a reason why you're not getting the help you'd expect. Here's what I said there, cleaned up in a way that it really should have been before I posted:

Have worked in three call centres, here’s the problem with #3.

In call centres your average staff member can take up to a hundred to a hundred and fifty calls *per day*. Each will be sent through abruptly into your ear straight after the one before, usually after a ping in their ear or in banks a voice telling them the kind of card the person is calling about. It’s a conveyor belt of calls, all different and if it’s a busy period, each customer testy having had to wait on the line for a good long while.

In that situation, with that many customers coming through and because you’re trying to balance customer service with the business imperative it’s extraordinarily difficult not to sound tired and to be “friendly, approachable and proactive” all day. I was all of those things 90% of the time; I helped to advise other workers on how to improve their own approach.

But sometimes you can feel like a fairground boxer going rounds upon rounds with total strangers trying their hardest to knock you over. If you start taking calls at 9:00 in the am and your first call is bad, one of those calls where nothing you said was right, where there was nothing you could do and you were screamed at (which happened a lot) it was very difficult to pull yourself together in time for the very next call with the next perfectly nice customer.

That first call might play on your mind for the rest of the day impacting on all the service you're offering, your mind forever thinking back and trying to decide if there was something you could have done to make the situation better, even if, much of the time, there wasn’t because the thing had escalated beyond anything you could have done even before you got there.

Which isn't necessarily a weakness. It means you care. You want to do your best for the customer. But working in a call centre can be a frustrating business because you can’t solve every problem even if the answer seems perfectly simply because the business isn’t designed that way. Oh the stories I could tell. Plus you can't often take a moment off the phone because you've only a limited amount of off call time allowance in the day.

In addition if an advisor refuses to escalate a call to a manager it’s often because they truly can’t. In some call centres it's what the team coach does, it’s how they spend their day. In others they will not take escalations under any circumstances. It’s never consistent either. I worked in three call centres and they all had different procedures and none of them were perfect and sometimes there wasn't even a manager on the floor to be able to escalate the call to anyway.

All of which said, I too have had to horrible customer service experiences and there are some truly rotten advisors out there, but I try to assume that sometimes it's not their fault. They’ve either had precious little training before being slung on the phones (which happens a lot if they’ve been brought in from an agency) or they’ve been worn down by a culture in which the caller *expects* that they’ll be rubbish and treat them that way, grinding away the shreds of their humanity.

5 comments:

last year's girl said...

I have nothing but sympathy for people who work in call centres (particularly the ones overseas who are employed by unscrupulous UK-based companies trying to avoid paying our minimum wage). Partly, it's because my other half works in a call centre and many of my friends have done, but also because although my own customer service experience is face to face that can be bamboozling enough - and at least, behind a till or whatever, you have more of an opportunity to make a personal connection with an irate customer, to calm them down with a smile.

Stuart Ian Burns said...

It's true. During the training we did go through sessions dealing with non-visual communication. Often it was simply about modulating your tone of voice which I tried very hard at.

Robin Brown said...

I never broke the 100 calls per day target in my year in a call centre, much to my annoyance.

I was a good 'agent' - I was attentive, usually polite but always assertive. I'd make sure people's problems were resolved. If it were necessary I'd escalate a call. I helped a lot of people.

On paper I was a bad agent. My call times were too long, as was my ACW (after-call work). I wouldn't adhere to scripts as they badly-written and confused the people phoning in.

I realised after a while that call centres aren't actually there to help people sort out problems, they're just a front line to take the bullet.

The other thing I took away from it was never to be rude to a call centre agent. It's probably not their fault, and they could royally stitch you up - something I did on one occasion to a caller who was unnecessarily and personally rude. Instant karma.

Vero Pepperrell said...

I really appreciated your comment, you know! I was somewhat aware of what a call centre job was like, but to hear you break it down into what every day looks like, it all makes a lot more sense.

As I hope I managed to express, I don't blame the call centre staff by any means, in fact, I try to make their day as good as possible by genuinely thanking them for trying to help.

The people I think need to review their position are those who setup, manage and finance call centres. Providing staff with better tools to help solve problems, using better technology to make the customer's experience more pleasant, etc.

Thanks for sharing your views!

(It's Vero, not Vera btw ;))

Stuart Ian Burns said...

Sorry, fixed that.

You're right. The problem is a lot of call centres are run on a budget and the advisers are working from age old legacy systems and are using old computer systems, and paradoxically corners are cut in providing a service to the customer so that more money goes to shareholders.

In some cases too they're not just providing a single service -- in one place I worked I was providing over a hundred and fifty different services and had to learn about them on the job.

Thanks for replying.