Call centres and their overlords
The concept of reality TV is not a new one and certainly didn't start with Big Brother or its contemporaries. The biggest influential factor on reality TV today was not prison, CCTV footage, nor even TV itself. It was the call centre: burgeoning collections of white collar workers all attached to their desks by headsets and phone units, PCs and paper, with the common goal of making sure that they reach allotted customer service or response levels each day. And today more people than ever are looking at the oft wall-mounted readouts telling them exactly how many more people they have got to speak to before they are allowed to take a break.
It's difficult to pin down exactly when the call centre became an autonomous entity and not just the product of having a few spare phones knocking around a particular department with enough people to pick them up whenever they yammered into life. There can be no doubt, however, that they had to be the progeny of the computer industry; after all, what product in the entire world today confounds more people daily than the PC? And at the end of the day, it is the lost, the confounded and usually the just plain irate that make the core occupational diet of the call centre worker (CCW).
Nevertheless, as I have noticed from my experience of these work environments, it is rarely the customer that is the cause of anxiety to the CCW on any given day. No - and this is what leads me back to my previous illustration of influence between reality television and call centres - it is very often the machinations of the Call Centre Overlords (CCOs) that can spoil even the most harmonious working environment. Just like Big Brother and its variations, nearly all call centres have somebody who is watching everyone – a digital demigod or a virtual voyeur.
Call centres are also ultimately the most significant example of employees-as-numbers in existence today. When Joe or Joanna Bloggs, the average CCW, walks in the door to work and dons their telephony equipment, they are then also unknowingly shedding their identity and wearing the mantle of something like 'employee 6070' for the next 8 hours. It is ironic, however, that the only time 6070 will become Joe Bloggs again is when there is a problem. I assume this is due to the fact that team leaders or managers find it hard to reprimand someone called 6070. Can you imagine a conversation between one of the CCOs and an employee?
CCO: "You were 23 seconds late back from break, 6070".
6070: I'm sorry CCO, it won't happen again".
However, loosing your identity is something that shouldn't be too much of a problem to anyone working in any organisation of a significant size today. It is, unfortunately, when the numbers become something other than what you count that make call centre work taxing.
I have worked in more than one organisation which had a large digital readout suspended from the ceiling showing how many lost, confounded and irate people were waiting to get their chance to talk to someone. These readouts are not, however, meant to be unobtrusive and inconspicuous – they are there to be seen and some of them would probably look more at home in Times Square or the centre of Tokyo showing the latest currency exchange rates from around the world.
They are the CCOs' unspoken method of telling CCWs to work harder, irrespective of whether said CCWs are going flat out as it is. And this is the crucial point: how can it be good for anyone working in any environment to have deadlines, targets and statistics constantly flashed in their face? Red LEDs whizzing across a screen in someone's face telling them that the lines are jammed and that the sacrosanct service levels are being affected. "Dear God," CCOs are saying, "another customer has to wait an extra 20 seconds before speaking to someone. This is unacceptable."
Anyone who has never worked in a call centre, and especially those with a low opinion of CCWs, take note: how would it feel to you if you had to carry on a few dozen separate conversations with (usually) annoyed people, each lasting a few minutes, before you could even walk away from your desk to get a drink of water or a cup of coffee? At its worst it can be nothing short of a psychological and vocal hammering. And irrespective of what CCOs say, I have never had an incidence of call centre training that could adequately prepare me for the job itself – how do you prepare someone for such an unrelenting occupation?
There is a simple reason for the above occupational-trauma though, and this epiphany I came by whilst spending my free seconds thinking whilst at work in one of these industrial farms. Call centres, with the exception of telesales-orientated ones, do not make money. They are there to save money instead. The inception of the call centre came on the back of someone discovering that you could save a lot of money by getting customers to fix problems themselves instead of sending someone out to help them.
However, it is because the call centres do not make money that they tend to be onerous places to work in. Usually they are on a very fixed budget that only allows for a bare minimum staff to be employed at any time, meaning that ultimately you may end up doing the work of two or three people. This budget is usually further whittled down by increased training and administration costs caused by the high levels of employee desertion. Most people soon realise (approximately after 2 hours) that being a CCW is not a job for life. Those who do believe it to be a job for life are soon working as though on a life sentence of hard labour. All told, if the sales division of a company is the mouth of the organisation, then the customer service/call centre department is the sphincter. This really pays testimony to the adage that you have a "shit job" if you work in a call centre.
If the above paints call centres in a bad light then so be it, but with any facet of any industry there can be good ones and bad ones. However, don't be surprised to find the digital ticker-boards and the Overlords watching your statistics to be de rigueur. From my viewpoint as a student I have found them to be (somewhat) an easy source of money and one with very few strings attached. This is one job where you will never, ever, bring your work home. Also, on a lighter note, I have found them to be good places to find potential dates in – there seems to be a common desperation in call centres that can drive even the most mismatched people together.
A word of advice to current and potential CCWs: if the voices don't stop after you've disconnected yourself from your phone, then it's time to call it a day.
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