Call Centres- outbound

Call Centres. Don't you just love them. Don't you just love it when you get a phone call just as you're sitting down to dinner. You pick the phone up and for a few seconds there's silence. Eventually a voice comes on the line and asks to speak to the owner of the house (and usually in a foreign accent).

Welcome to the world of Call Centres. I've worked in several over the years and basically there are two sorts- inbound and outbound.
Of the two, inbound is probably better. The customer rings you. With outbound you ring the customer.
I've done a couple of temp jobs in outbound call centres.
The first was a part time job while I was recovering from a shoulder injury. In hindsight I shouldn't have taken it because I got into trouble with the DSS and lost my benefit for a few weeks. Although the rules stated that you could work up to 16 hours a week without losing your benefits you have to get their permission first. The problem is that they are slow in reaching a decision, and the job has gone before they come back to you. So I went ahead and took the job.

It was awful. Soul destroying. Four hours of torture for minimum wage.

The job training was of the "you'll soon get the hang of it" variety. My tools were a telephone and a well thumbed local business directory. My task was to cold call local firms on behalf of an agency that tried to find placements for young people. My firm got paid for every appointment I was able to make for the agency rep.

Well for a start half the numbers didn't work. Most of the rest when they could be bothered to answer the phone weren't interested and it took less than a week to work through the directory. I was promised another database of businesses to work through but that never happened. In the end I gave up, thoroughly discouraged.
What a crap job.

I have every sympathy with call centre operators who ring to try and sell me cavity wall insulation or whatever it is they're trying to sell. It's a thankless job with no end product and no job satisfaction.

I did another spell working in an outbound call centre. This was slightly different. I was working for a domestic shower company making appointments for engineers to call to fix leaking showers. So in essence it wasn't really cold calling as the client had already rung in to report the fault.
My job was to make an appointment for the engineer to call.
Each engineer was allocated a territory and we had to manage his appointments so that he made best use of his time. Sometimes the engineer would have to travel a couple of hundred miles to get to all his calls so it wasn't possible to set an exact time when he would arrive. The best we could promise was either morning or afternoon. Sometimes I'd have to phone a client a dozen times before they answered the phone, and then there'd be negotiations because the day or time wasn't suitable.
Once again I have every sympathy with the operator when I have to ring to make an appointment for an engineer to call. They can't just drop everything and come at your beck and call.

I went for a couple of interviews for outbound call centre jobs, not that I was interested in getting the job mind you. Sometimes you go to an interview just to keep your agency happy.

I recall being sent to an interview about twenty five miles away, way outside the distance I was willing to travel for a job at minimum wage. I was told that it was an inbound call centre but when I arrived it was outbound.

It was a short interview.

Another time I was sent to a new call centre that was being set up. They were trying to get local builders to sign up to a builders only credit card. It was a sound business idea with soild financial backing.
When I arrived I found the same management team that I had for the first job I described above. Not a good start.
There were a dozen or so candidates and we were given some team building tests followed by a face to face interview. During the preliminaries we were told about "open" and "closed" questions, and to use open questions where possible.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-ended_question

I had my interview with the personnel woman and she asked me if I knew the difference between an "open" and "closed" question? It was with great delight that I answered "yes" and said no more.

Apparently I did enough to be offered a job, but the hours (Mon-Fri 2-10pm)were against me. I was playing a lot of music and attending meetings most evenings so it was no go. Still, I'd have enjoyed the challenge.
I've no idea if the credit card got off the ground. It depended on getting the local builders merchants to accept them, and getting enough local builders to sign up. In the end I expect the recesssion killed it off because I've never seen it advertised anywhere.