One Moment Caller

Be nice to the call center person

Back in the past, I used to sell software to call centers. That meant that I went to a lot of call centers around Australia. And I noticed some patterns.

Estate agents constantly talk about “location, location, location”. And the location of most call centers immediately flags up their core value proposition: They are cheap. Typically I was driving to some business park in the suburbs. The offices were seas of oatmeal and gray with cheap desks and partitions. Startups and ad agencies like to signal their commitments to creativity and individual worth by putting in foosball tables or hanging motorbikes from the ceiling or some such. But these things cost money and call centers are all about cost control.

Many people have stated that call centres are the new “dark satanic mills”. This is grossly unfair. The dark, satanic mills of the Victoria period only destroyed their workers’ bodies, not their humanity. And call centers are not dark. There are strip lights and computer screens and, if you luck out, you may get a seat by the window with some sun coming in. Any darkness will remain inside your heart.

The next thing you notice about the environment is that someone has tried to brighten up the grey walls with some corporate fun. There are printouts of photos from the last office party. There are trophies awarded to employees of the month. In my experience, the brighter the attempts at cheering people up, the more miserable the work. Above all, the leader boards squat on the walls like the Eye of Sauron over Mordor. Average Handle Time. Close Rates. Sales numbers. NPS.

Call center staff exist in an iron cage of metrics. The transactional nature of the work combined with modern communications technologies mean that everyone exists under the Rule(r) of Measurement. And staff are set against each other to compete for higher numbers, bonuses, and their picture on the wall. From a selfish perspective, this made it easy for me to construct business cases for the software we were selling. You could directly link an improvement to Average Call Handling Time (AHT) to the bottom line. But it also leads to an endless game of cat and mouse between employer and employee. One way of juicing your AHT numbers is to cut off the call early or fob the customer off with a short, incorrect explanation rather than a long, correct one.

The metrics also remind us that call centers are more like factories of workers than offices of professionals. But the labour of call center workers is not physical, it is emotional.

“With respect to individual outcomes, the disconnect between employees’ true feelings and the organizationally-sanctioned emotion display rules can be costly for employees.” - Danielle Dorice Van Jaarsveld

Call center workers are typically used to either deal with customer issues, problems, and complaints or to sell and market products and offerings. The lowest stress version of this is an inbound call center where you are taking orders from customers. The people calling you want to talk to you. However this is largely being replaced by online ordering.

More stressful is outbound sales or “cold calling”. In software, these roles are called SDRs (Sales Development Representatives). N.B. These people do not close the deal. They simply try to secure meetings for people who that do (Account Executives). The majority of people you will call (or try to call) do not want to talk to you. You will typically have to make around 60 calls a day and may secure 2-3 positive responses. If you don’t like rejection then this job is not for you.

Finally, many call center jobs are first line support for when the s*** hits the fan. The callers are, almost by definition, unhappy. You have the challenge of both solving their problem and in some case calming them down. However frontline staff have rarely created the problem in the first place and may not have the power to fix it by themselves. Senior management may even have deliberately approved something in the product or service that will enrage customers but be profitable (price hikes are a classic example but far from the only one). They will never have to face an angry customer. But their frontline staff will. If the staff are lucky, they may get a script on how to explain the annoying thing the organization has done to the luckless caller.

Personally, I think that if you are a senior person who has made that decision then you should sit on the phones for day to feel how it goes down. Glancing at a Power BI dashboard just doesn’t cut it as leadership - especially if you claim that Customer Centricity is a core value.

Obviously the cost imperative has lead to call centers being off-shored, just as it will lead to human agents being replaced by machines. Already most companies are using artificial chatbots for first line queries. It remains to be seen how good these machines will get and how many people will remain in this industry. Currently 17 million people are employed in call centers globally. These are not great jobs but they are OK jobs. However automation requires strong processes and most organizations have weak processes with human beings papering over the cracks.

No matter how frustrated I am with an organization, I try not to take it out on the call center person. The source of my frustrations is rarely their fault. However I will feel no such sense of restraint when dealing with a machine. It will probably make me a worse person as a result.

When all the customer touchpoints are fully automated, senior executives will have finally realized their secret desire of never having to interact with the people who ultimately fund their business ever again. Shout at the screen all you like.