New Call Center Mgr syndrome. Any CC employees here?

In My Humble Opinion
21

I do work in a call center, and you’re reminding me all the things about my job that are good. Such as, but not limited to, my awesome bosses.

Compared to the OP, our work policies would really make you weep. Full-time employees get 19 paid days off a year (sick days require a doctor’s note after 3 days of absence), a pension and profit sharing plan, an hour lunch and two 15-minute breaks which you can take whenever you want (mindful of coverage, of course.)

Though we did get an e-mail the other day with a little graph of how our abandonment rate has shot up over the last couple of months. But in addition to asking us to please be mindful of when we take our breaks, they also just launched this whole new automated system for bankruptcy that’s supposed to take the pressure off the Call Center.

And jeez… it really has. I had so little to do today that I read 56 pages out of two books. That’s partly because of the Holiday season, but also probably because they actually did something to work on the abandonment rate besides blame us for it.

And we have mandatory meetings, but they are during work, and they are fun. The things we’re reviewed on seem to change almost weekly though. Once using the client’s name was a mandatory thing on the quality review sheet, but now not so much. There are certain procedures we have to go through but there is a ton of leeway in how we do it. The details and the procedures change constantly, but they are consistent in informing you of the changes.

The only thing really stressful about my job, fortunately, is the job itself. Which is not scripted, and involves lots of weeping and yelling–bonus! In Spanish too! I also get 5 calls a day with questions that I have no answer for, situations they never even touched in training. The other day I got one my boss didn’t even have an answer for. But that’s kind of what makes it challenging I guess.

Oh–and we get awards. People who score high on their quality reviews get balloons tied to their cubicles, and recently I got a little paper plaque for having an above-average book rate. If someone gets an e-mail complement from a client or a field office, it gets forwarded to the entire call center. Everybody knows and loves everyone, it is a really welcoming environment.

We’re kind of like the first line of defense for all the calls in our corporation, and it makes me feel important.

I would not do this job for 2 seconds if my bosses and co-workers weren’t amazingly awesome. If I had your job, I would probably run away screaming. Maybe you can take my example as evidence that all call center jobs, while stressful, are not inherently horrible and dehumanizing.

22

Oh, there are MANY call centers in SF and even more in the east bay and peninsula. Some that come to mind (that are in the city): Headsets.com, The Sak, Good Vibrations, and many, many others.

I work for a very,very large hospital, largely funded by the state of California. I don’t think there’s any danger of our call center being moved out of the city…

23

As I understand SUI (which varies by state), wouldn’t company X’s high(er) turn over rate cause them to have to pay one heck of an increased premium amount to the state they are doing business in…? States no likey massive increases in unemployment claims rates by a specific employers. It makes them so unhappy, many states boost the employer’s SUI reserve. As this amount is usually extremely significant (think the price of Bill Gates house), it tends to get noticed rather quickly when it shows up on annual or quarterly reports.

It takes a little while, but with a monetary bump that significant, bean-counters will investigate like picnic ants to see wtf is going on. I can see them becoming aware of this at corporate no more than 12 months after people start leaving the sinking ship in bulk (less if the end of a fiscal year which will show this comes up sooner). From there, I’d guess a short investigation before sh-canning Laughing Boy…

24

My husband worked in a call center for a year–for one of those payday loan places. Two weeks ago, they called everybody into a morning meeting, handed out envelopes and said “We’re closing down this branch and moving to another area. Bye.”

During the job hunt, he was offered a data entry job and another call center job. The CC job paid more/hour and was closer to the house. I told him he didn’t need to go through that crap again, and we’d make some sacrifices if we had to. I’m really in awe of anybody who can do time in a call center. I wouldn’t last an hour.

25

Unemployment insurance is based on involuntary turnover. If you leave a job voluntarily because, say, you hate wearing a tie and you didn’t get your bonus, you can’t claim unemployment and it doesn’t affect the employer’s premiums. There is oodles of state variation and gray area in unemployment insurance, but this is the overarching principle.

26

The thing with call centres is that a lot of them are outsourced with temporary staffing agencies like Manpower. Hired employees may get unemployment benefits, but if you lay off temporary workers, the staffing agency will find work for the person somewhere else. If said person cannot get work, unemployment I believe would be on the staffing agency (I think, not sure about that, they may not be on the hook for it at all).