“That” as a relative pronoun referring to people goes back to the 14th century. The OP was ill-advised, but the grammar of the title is not a problem.
like dwc1970, I work in a travel Call Centre. To get the job in the first place requires a 2 year travel and tourism diploma. To get that one must have completed highschool. It pays quite well, thank you. In fact, I’m about to be off for 9 days in Europe on some of my 4 weeks vacation this year (other bennies are good too!). While there is scripting and calls are monitored for quality, we have a lot of leeway in what we say or do. Standard greeting, address customer by name, lowest possible fare, thank you for calling. Otherwise, banter away, just get the job done.
As to the average handle time, I have to up mine by surfing between calls, because it’s too low - I can get your ass from Ottawa to Toronto and back with car and hotel in about five minutes, and finish the file in another two - in our parlance, that’s a 420 second handle time. Too bad my target is 930. If I go too low this year, my next year’s target gets set lower, and that affects my bonus if I don’t hit it. I figure on tanking a year sometime soon.
I have opportunities to train and mentor, I cover for supervisor vacations, and can adjust my own schedule adherance as it suits me - no questions asked as long as I’m producing.
The last point I’d like to address is the not versed in all aspects of the job thing. I’ve been doing this for 8 years now, and there’s nothing I haven’t seen. I did two years of overnights on the emergency line, and believe you me, the people calling at three in the morning aren’t calling for the hell of it - they’re stuck in Frankfurt and need to get home now. Fixing that isn’t a job for someone stupid. None of my coworkers are, either.
In conclusion, call me and piss me off, and you’re in a middle seat all the way to Sydney, asshole 
I’m suspect you really don’t believe all people who work in a call center are stupid and are just being pointlessly inflammatory, but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. I work in a call center. It’s actually a pretty lovely job, though often stressful because most of our clients are emotionally distraught when they call in. Sometimes I feel more like a therapist than a customer service rep.
Everyone who works in my position is required to have a Bachelors Degree. I graduated With Honors from an excellent university and have every intention of furthering my education. Most of my colleagues are in graduate school, and some of them, god knows how they do it, are raising children at the same time. None of them strike me as remarkably dumb.
The ways in which my call center are limited has more to do with how the company is set up than anything else. There are definitely times I can’t help as well as I’d like to. It’s actually a difficult job. I field calls every day from a wide range of people asking all sorts of random questions about their finances–and I often do it in a second language. Today I had an elderly lady drill me for about fifteen minutes on the nuances of Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 bankruptcy–not a very standard call. I’m not a fucking attorney, but because I respect the fact that people are all about instant gratification, I gave her as much general information as possible and was friendly up until the moment she hung up on me without bothering to say goodbye.
There is no way in hell a new recruit could have fielded that woman’s questions – the ability to help in flexible ways is a product of experience. One reason I suspect people complain about call center incompetence is that most organizations have very high turnover. The quality of service you are going to get from someone in their first week, and someone with months or years of experience, is going to be very, very different.
I’ve heard the stories that call centers are sweat-shop like environments, but I don’t see it where I work. I get two fifteen minute breaks and an hour lunch break which I chose to shorten so I can leave early. I get 17 paid days off a year and an annual cut of their profit and if I wanted, I’d get health benefits. When my uncle died last week, I took five days off in a row and all I got were well-wishes and heart-to-heart support. I have incredibly kind, encouraging, understanding, amazing bosses. It’s the best job I’ve ever had, but it’s also the most stressful. Mostly because of people like you.
Note that airliner cargo areas are pressurized, though not necessarily to an extent that guarantees chip bags will arrive intact.
From one former call center employee to others: whence the outrage? I’m sad to say it, but most of my coworkers were indeed pretty fucking stupid. Some of them weren’t, but most of them were. My habit of spending my spare time seeking out and fixing their most common fuckups was what got me promoted…and once I was promoted, I spent far (far, far, far, far) too much time fixing endless streams of egregiously harebrained horseshit that some monkey had slammed into a keyboard with nary a moment’s thought to believe that the average employee had the processing capacity of a musical greeting card, or that the situation was particular to my old floor.
Even more fun was contacting the customers to inform them of the impressively myriad ways in which each successive bonehead to get his hands on their accounts had further cocked them up, and exactly how I’d be untangling the intricate knots of human stupidity that resulted in the whole thing landing on my desk, while using language that wouldn’t make the company liable for million-dollar lawsuits.
Myself, I wouldn’t take the OP as a personal insult. There’s a difference between saying “call center employees are stupid” and “you work in a call center, therefore YOU are stupid”. Even at that, the worst case scenario is that the OP really does believe that to be true of everyone who has ever occupied the inside of a call center and received payment for it…and if that’s the case, then he is an imbecile of such epic proportions that I’d not care enough about his opinion to expend the effort typing a response.
I’m really not surrounded by morons at work, Roland. YMMV, but my mileage isn’t half bad. Retail agents are really the bane of my existence. Had the rant been about retail salespeople who add things on to people’s accounts and otherwise totally FUBAR their accounts being what’s wrong with America today, I wouldn’t have argued! 
Meh. The OP was ranting; and if you can’t paint with a broad brush here, then where can you? Besides, I’ve been called worse. Often.
[sup]By my wife. In Korean.[/sup]
Heh. I was asking where the outrage was coming from, not calling for more of it. Suppose I could have phrased that a bit more clearly.
Maybe we wouldn’t need call centers if companys wouldn’t try to take on more customers than they can service. Split the company into different divisions, do something.
:smack:
OK, you try booking travel for a large, centralized, government entity (like the entire fucking government), serving 5000 people per day, and try to get some trained monkeys who not only know geography, but can get you from here to there as fast as possible. Do it with less than 180 people, and commit to a service level of 80% of the calls answered within 20 seconds. Good luck to you.
Here’s a test: How would one get from YGK (Kingston, ON) to THR (Tehran, Iran), in less than three hops, in less than two days? I’d like to know!