Call Centres- inbound

I've already written about my time in outbound call centres but I also spent some time working in inbound centres as well. I've already written about my time at the Ricoh service centre in Wellingborough and how my career prospects (ha ha) were determined by the application of some arcane nonsense called psychometric profiling, surely the worst HR nonsense to be dreamt up.

When temping it was my custom to do the rounds of the employment agencies at least once a week. This was firstly to keep my name and face uppermost in the minds of the bookers, and secondly to sniff out any possible jobs before the others.

One day I was contacted by one of the agencies to ask if I fancied working in Market Harborough in an inbound call centre. I suspect that I only got the job because I had a car and would be taking three others with me, but hey, it's a job.

The job involved sitting at a computer terminal wearing a telephone headset. The computer was working the AS400 software, so no surprises at all. It was a busy office with about 50 workstations in quite a small space.The company handled magazine subscriptions for many publishers and their profitability depended on answering as many calls as quickly as possible.
The problem was to do with a weekly part-work magazine that had a choice of free gift on the cover. Except that it wasn't. The buyer had to ring up to say which gift he wanted, and the extra calls were slowing the operation.

The training was quite good. Yes we had a day of training!
Initially we had to write out each call rather than directly input the details, and give the completed form to the supervisor who then arranged for the evening shift to enter the call onto the system.
Over the course of a few days the amount of onscreen work increased, until we'd reached an acceptable speed and standard to be left on our own.

Although the room was crowded it was a lonely existence as chatting to your neighbour was discouraged. I worked there for two separate spells and never knew half the names. The breaks were also very short and there was only just enough time to get from the call centre to the canteen, grab something to eat and drink before heading back.

My co-temps were much younger than me, and would chat away happily among themselves while I drove them to and from work. I felt excluded (but that was mostly through choice- I wasn't following the latest twists and turns of soap operas and celebrity culture.)

One thing I did find better than subsequent postings was the acceptance of male workers by the female staff and management. In one call centre I was made to feel an intruder in an all female clique.

Sex discrimination cuts both ways.

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.

World Cup Cricket

I was watching the cricket this afternoon and it reminded me of the time I worked in a call centre selling tickets for the 1998 Cricket World Cup. The main centre for getting tickets was at Lords and it was soon apparent that they couldn't cope with demand. People were hanging on the phone for hours trying to get through, and there was a real danger that the matches would be played before the tickets could be sold. Something had to be done.
I had a call from an agency asking me to turn up at a location in Market Harborough where I would be trained ready for going live the next day.
This was the first time I'd worked in a call centre so I was interested to find out how it worked.
The computer programme was fairly straight forward to use and we were soon up and running. The phone would ring in my ear and I'd find out what match the person wanted tickets for. Tickets were finite and many matches had sold out. We mostly had games featuring the smaller nations like Bangladesh, Kenya, Ireland and Holland in provincial grounds. All games featuring England and India were sold out and we had only one Pakistan game with unsold tickets.
I won't bore you with details of how the process worked. I've worked in a number of inbound call centres since then, selling magazine subscriptions and booking engineers for photocopiers. They all use versions of the same software, so if you've seen one, you've seen them all.

I did learn one important thing regarding Indians and Pakistanis. I'm not being racist, just telling you what happened.
If someone rang asking about a game featuring India and they were told that it had sold out they expressed dissapointment and rang off.
If someone rang about a Pakistan game and I said that it had sold out, they wouldn't accept it. Are you sure? You don't have one or two left? I can pay a bit extra etc, etc. It's as if it's built into their culture that tickets can always be obtained with a little backsheesh.
They wouldn't take no for an answer. If I said there weren't any tickets they would take it as a personal affront, as if their money, their offer of backsheesh wasn't good enough.
There was one Pakistan game that had some tickets. We were told that tickets were limited to two only per caller, so we had the spectacle of the buyer asking for ten or twenty tickets and being told no. Then they said can my brother/sister/auntie have two tickets? I checked and was told that they could if they came to the phone and ordered them in "person". So another voice would then buy two tickets for his brother, another voice would buy two for his sister, then his auntie/uncle/cousin/grandmother all had two. Once he had his ten or twenty tickets they'd all be paid for with one credit card.
Specially obtained to buy tickets for the World Cup.
The tickets were specially printed with the buyer's name, but when people in the same family are called Hussein or Ahmed or Mohammed who knew if the tickets were genuinely for family members or to be touted outside the ground?

We never had this problem with the Indians, only with the Pakistanis.
Maybe if there were tickets available for Indian matches I might have a different view but my opinion of the two nations was definitely shaped by my time selling World Cup tickets.