For staff at a Melbourne call centre for internet service provider Netspace, one-fifth of a minute is considered time enough for a rest break between calls.
Staff have also been told they are now only to leave their desks four times a day - during set breaks - in an effort to increase the number of calls handled.
A former employee said some technical support staff were now too scared to go to the toilet during their shifts.
After initially refusing the answer questions about their treatment of staff, Netspace this afternoon relented this afternoon. But the company only partially answered a list of questions put to them.
The company said in a statement that an email outlining the call centre rules was sent out “in relation to specific performance issues that were being experienced by our customers”.
Netspace denied that staff were told they could only leave their desks four times a day, despite that directive being in an email.
We’d have Occupational Safety and Health down on that company for starters over here. 12 second breaks and no moving from your desk except for 4 breaks a day sounds like a recipe for the OSH folks to come along and lecture about exercises at least. Point is that folks in that industry may have the feeling there’s little else to do except that kind of work with those conditions. As long as that’s a reality, companies like that can get away with a lot.
Is that ususual? I used to work in call centers and factories when I was in college and you more or less had to be at your station the whole day, with the exception of lunch and a 5 minute break every 2 hours. But you also get to go home at 5:00.
I agree. That is just basic call center stuff although at the crapier end. I have worked with several of big name ones but in a consulting capacity. You see weird rules like that in most of them. You almost always see a xx-break between calls because it really isn’t a break but time to jot down notes instead. Most of them also have psycho requirements about being on time, bathroom breaks, etc. Some have a rule that being 1 second late (literally) will get you a written warning and about 3 of those will get you canned. They often have daily, weekly, and monthly charts showing each operator’s performance on a giant poster placed in a public location. I never really understood why they do all of this. People that man the phones in a call-center usually don’t make much money and professional people that do cost money don’t have equivalent rules.
Ditto. And the article seemed a bit whiny to me, to be honest. That’s the way call centers work, and I’ve been on one too.
The thing was, they treated me really well in every way they could. Yes, it was a demanding job in that every minute I had to be cheerful and happy and ready to solve problems, and always there, but the customers were repeats and very friendly and my coworkers good.
This is when one bitchy girl can ruin everything for you, and I speak from experience. One girl who can’t make it on time, who whines through everything, and starts fights. We had to be somewhat close since we worked togethe like a team; no one could be late, the phones had to be covered, etc. She was horrible.
I don’t understand the problem either. That is what a call center is. I’ve worked in a couple both incomming and outgoing. As soon as you hang up, the next one in que get’s transfered to you, or the next number comes up on the screen if call-out. There was no 12 second break, maybe 2 seconds to grab a quick drink. After 2 hours you got a break, 2 more and lunch, two more another break, then 2 more and go home. Pretty much any service position job you arn’t going to get breaks more than every two hours, eveybody can hold their piss that long I would hope.
It sounds like it was a very lax and poorly managed call-center before, and someone finally decided to make it business place.
Having been a manager (I still am one) at several call centers in different industries and different regions, I think 12 seconds between calls is actually fairly generous. I’ve worked at call centers where the wrap time (time between when you hang up and when another call can ring on your phone) is only 5 or 7 seconds. That doesn’t necessarily equate to being chained to your desk like one of the kiddie mine slaves in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom - hell, the people who work for me have wireless headset phones and can stand at their desk or walk wherever they need to while talking to patients. I think whoever wrote that article just seized on “Oh noes, 12 seconds!” thinking it would sound horribly cruel to people who haven’t worked an inbound call center job.
Our phone system only gives 10 seconds betwen calls. Of course, we aren’t specifically a call center – we’re a parts distributor, and while we can get quite busy at certain times of the year, there has never been an environment where we feel like we’re chained to our desks. Hell, we all make liberal use of the “not ready” button whenever we need to, and as long as we don’t abuse it, it’s all good. But then we’re have an unusually laid back work culture here.
12 seconds doesn’t seem at all unreasonable as long as they aren’t depriving employees of the opportunity to take care of necessities when needed (bathroom breaks) and they have time to do whatever typing/paperwork needs to be done between calls. Heck, I keep my own call log – all typed manually in Notepad (this isn’t policy, I just wanted to keep records). It’s never a problem handling that.
I worked seven years in a call center. We got 15 minutes every two hours, with a 1-hour break at mid-shift. There were wiggle factors built in; “bio breaks” were allowed in special circumstances, and it was clearly communicated to us that the 15 minute breaks were meant to be “rest” breaks for the brain. Nobody was ever fired for running to the potty outside his/her designated break time.
We often didn’t get 12 seconds between calls, however. I worked on a team that supported a major banking company, and we competed to see how many calls we could take consecutively, without any “down” time between them. It was common to leave the phone in active mode, so calls would come into the phone one right after another. I learned how to multi-task that way. It was a slow day that I didn’t take 120 calls.
In our call center you can set your phone to “after call work” (ACW) mode while you are on a call, so that when the call ends you won’t get another call. This is useful for when you need to document a record or do some other task where you cannot be busy with another caller while trying to finish something up. ACW is very useful for when it’s the end of your shift and you don’t want to take another call.
As for our breaks, for an eight-hour shift you get a 15-minute break, then a 30-minute lunch and then another 15-minute break at approximately two-hour intervals. This is reasonable and acceptable. If you need a bathroom break and you can’t wait for your next break or lunch you can go into ACW so you won’t get another call and then set the phone to the “personal” auxiliary state (there are different auxiliary states for time away from the phone such as “meeting”, “break”, “lunch” and “personal”). Our time-on-the-phone performance is based on what is called schedule adherence. For each month we must maintain an adherence rating of 90% or more. This allows for some deviation such as when a long call extends into the time at which you were due to go to lunch (you still get your full 30-minute lunch as soon as the call is finished even if you are running late). This works out to 1% for every four and a half minutes. I can afford to lose 1% of adherence time if I need to get up and use the restroom. The policy allows for things like this while at the same time prevents it from being abused.
They are strict about being on time and remaining on the phone for the entire duration of your shift. If you are even one minute late you get dinged with 1/4 of an “occurrence” point. A half hour to one hour is 1/2 an occurrence, one to two hours is 3/4 of an occurence, and over two hours is a full occurrence point. Ten occurence points within a single year will get you canned. Even though the expectations for being on time are rigid, overall the allowances for being late from time to time are fairly lenient, really, and most agents do have a few occurrence points from being late from time to time. Shit happens. For the record, I have been sitting at a steady zero occurrences since I started here.
And you often need the “after call work time”. When you’re banging away at calls one after another you tend to fill up pages. I worked for a carpet wholesaler so I had whole times when I would write down “Call Shawmark for _____” or “Check on delivery status, call trucking company.” And then when the calls slowed down I would catch up on these things and call the people back. If the calls didn’t slow down we would ask for 20-30 minutes off the phone and make our calls, or just make them one at a time between other calls.
Man, has this turned into an impromptu “Ask the call center rep?” thread?
I’ve worked in GREAT call centers and SHITTY ones.
The great one, I wish I never left, but it was completely laid back. If you weren’t on a call you could do whatever the hell you wanted. Including watching movies on your own laptop, knitting or surfing the internet. They even gave free fountain drinks and every couple of weeks there was a traveling ice cream sundae cart around the center. And working on holidays? Double time and a half. Which was great since holidays were catered and almost noone called.
The shitty one. You got quickie performance reviews daily. Intense ones weekly. You were allowed to use the net but only certain sites. Pay was shit and if you called in sick more than 3 times a year (doctor’s note or not) you were fired. No ifs ands or buts. Needless to say I didn’t stay there long.
Sounds a lot like my place. Except there are no free fountain drinks (we get free coffee though), we’re salaried, so no overtime pay (we aren’t open holidays anyway), and the ice cream truck that patrols this area is my sworn mortal enemy.
But other than that, yeah … unless we want to suck up to management, a lack of anything to do (paperwork, calls, etc.) means time for whatever the hell we want to do. And they pay me good money to do it.
I’m surprised that other call centers have preslotted time between calls. When I worked in a call center, we never had that. If there were calls waiting, another call came through unless you blocked them with a code (like that you were still working on the account, or bathroom). Bathroom breaks, work time, etc. all had to meet established goals - generally 87-90% of the time needed to be accounted for on calls and the standard breaks/lunches (two paid 15 minute breaks, one unpaid half hour lunch).
Call centers thrive on total control. You literally can monitor every single thing employees do - everything they’re doing on the computer, every word spoken on a call - if you want to. The timing is extremely regimented. We actually forbade any non-work-related internet – I mean ANY – and drug our heels about email for the longest time.
Call centers have notoriously high turnover. They are all about productivity and generally not as much about quality of service (in any meaningful way).
Does it suck for the workers? Sure, one of the reasons I left, but companies are looking at the bottom line. If people are late or wandering around, hold time goes up unless they’re overstaffed, and overstaffing costs a lot.
Now I work for a tiny company that has no call center. Well, I suppose I’m a call center of one.