Present and past call center/help desk employees

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

As I’ve said in other threads, I am now working as tech support for alarm company employees. Although I’ve gotten use to the job, I don’t see myself making a career out of it.
It seems the more senior people have been around for 5 or 6 years.

How long have you been working / did you work at a call center or help desk?. It could be IT work, or for a credit card company, or taking orders. Just any job where your main duty was to take incoming calls.

And if you did leave did your job duties help you get your next job, or was/is your other job in a different field?

2

I did call centre work on and off for about 6 years, culminating in 3 years with a telecomm company, first on their Dial/ADSL helpdesk, then in their Financial Services division.

I had an emotional breakdown. My next job I refused to touch a phone at all. I’ve upheld that ideal for the last four years now. I refuse to have any telephone contact with clients/customers, and if someone tries to rescope my role to include that I will refuse point blank.

The interesting thing is that I was damned good at my job. I consistently had excellent quality stats, and my actual call numbers were pretty good - but I couldn’t disengage properly. I got very wrapped up in trying to fix things that were outside the scope of what I should be doing, or trying to fix things that other CSRs did wrong. But never again.

3

My first job was as a call centre rep for an insurance company. Stayed there about 7 months until an opening in the marketing department opened up (I had a degree in Marketing). 13 years later I head up a marketing team for a large bank.

The job was good to get a foot in the door; I learned a huge amount about our product range in a very short amount of time, formed good relationships with advisers and many areas within the company and gained insights into customer service and consumer attitudes which I still call on from time to time.

Without the marketing degree it would have been a harder shift into the department, although it was not unheard of for a move like that to happen. More often they moved into other service areas, or claims management.

4

I spent 10 years working in a call center, 8 at the most recent one. It wasn’t your typical call center, however. I was a 9-1-1 Dispatcher and Calltaker.

Definitely left a bad taste in my mouth when it comes to using the phone. You can’t imagine the things I’ve heard. But it definitely got me on the track to where I am today… I still work for the department I dispatched for, but as a deputy now, no longer a dispatcher.

Best move I ever made was getting out of that place.

Get a membership to a gym. Use it. If you start working in a call center, you’re gonna need it, both for the spread and stress relief.

5

I work for a state agency that has a fairly large call center; we have vendors with call centers as well. IME, call centers have a high turn-over rate, but I think that might be because they allow employees to become qualified for other jobs within the organization.

One of my early jobs with the agency involved handling two very busy phone lines. That made me refuse to get call waiting on my home phone and made me averse to using the phone more than absolutely necessary. The aversion passed, but I still don’t have call waiting on my land line.

I’d say it’s a really good opportunity for you to gain experience in the field and can be a good first step along a career path.

6

I’ve been working for a call centre for almost 11 years. Now I work from home doing the same thing. However, it is not a job in my field. Explaining why I am now in this other field is a long long story.

7

I, similarly to Girl From Mars’s old job, work at the incoming call center of an insurance company (claims department, I take new claims and answer questions about existing claims, and we also take the default calls so we do a lot of cold-transferring for people who are too impatient/stupid/deaf to press the right options). I’ve been here for just over 2.5 years now. There are some “lifers” in my department who’ve been here for 25+ years, I have no freaking idea how they do it. There are a fair number of handicapped folks who work here, it seems like a good job if you can’t walk well but your arms, ears, and eyes still work.

There’s definitely upward-mobility out of my department for sufficiently-motivated individuals. However, my attendance record, while always within the bounds of our company’s PTO policy, pretty much disqualifies me from promotions (I take the maximum number of unscheduled days off annually, though I’ve never had an unpaid day–those are practically career-ending death knells).

Of my original training class of 16, I am one of only 2 people remaining in the department. A couple others are still with the company in other departments, but most of them just quit within the first year. It’s a very stressful environment, except maybe for the type of people who don’t mind mind-numbingly repetitive duties. It has strengthened my extant hatred of telephones, and given me a newfound understanding of just how mean/dumb otherwise nice/smart people can be.

My mom complains that I don’t call her enough, but by the time I’ve talked for 40 solid hours at work in a week, I am in **no mood **to pick up the phone. Or even talk at all.

8

I gotta echo most of rachelellogram’s post.

I’ve been doing call center work for just over 2.5 years and I’m more than ready to move on. Every day I get to despise it a little bit more, as anyone who has read my mini-rants can attest. It isn’t the 90% of my customers who as just fine, it’s the 10% that are a combination of one or more of; mind numbingly stupid, screaming angry, completely insane, unrealistic expectations. On person being all four can ruin my day and then some.

From my training class of 29, all but four of us were gone within a year. Now the remaining four of us look at each other and say “what the fuck is wrong with us that we’re still here?”

When you come in the door, the pay doesn’t seem so bad, but after any length of time, especially in technical call centers, you start to feel that they are not paying you enough for what they demand of you. They also have petty assed rules that have been piled layer over layer over the years because of your moron co-workers who take advantage of every loophole or just don’t care enough to the point of being fired. I very much dislike collective punishment and I have complained frequently about instituting harsh rules that affect everyone rather than simply dealing with the individual people causing the problems. Yes, it works that way at pretty much every job, but it is worse in large (300+ people) call centers, where you get ‘out of the blue’ rules because Ned on the other end of the floor (who you don’t know) did something ridiculous.

All in all, I consider Call Center work to be very much like the Security work I did before this. That is to say; it is a good job to hold for a brief period of time while you prepare yourself for something more worthwhile. It is NOT a career.

9

For my company, the inane and randomly-generated rules thankfully don’t apply to our dress code or conduct. Rather, they continually invent things for us to do that aren’t explicitly stated in our intake system, and will never be added. When I first started here, there was a verbatim script to follow. Now they’ve added so much bullshit to ask before taking a claim, and shit to tell customers after filing a claim, but they can’t be arsed to hire anybody to add those new questions into the claim intake system (nor have they increased the time we’re allowed to spend on a call, I guess we’re supposed to pull it out of our asses). So, unless there is a manager sitting with me and listening to me take calls, I stick to the script I was trained on (and get rid of customers in record time!). Sometimes I even skip questions that I know the answers to and fill them out on the customer’s behalf. GASP! So my QA scores get progressively lower as they add more stupid shit to the system, but my times are lightning-fast. You sacrifice one for the other in this environment, as it were.

Anyway, if you couldn’t tell, I’m very change-resistant, and a call center is totally the wrong environment for that. Break and lunch times change on a daily basis based on call forecasts. I never know from one day to the next exactly what time shit’s going to happen. They’re changing stuff all the time and adding new accounts into the system and blahfuckingblah. At least I have multiple years of experience, though at this point I’d rather leverage myself into a behind-the-scenes position. No more customer facing, pls.

10

I’ve been in help desk type work for awhile – about 10 years – though I’ve been out of the actual call center environment for a bit, thank goodness. Help desk can vary extremely. On one extreme, you have the grindhouse-type massive soul-crushing call center, like Chimera describes; on the other, you have people like me, the only help desk person in the company, who doesn’t even do it full time because there isn’t enough volume.

I got into help desk work more or less because I needed a job. I graduated college in a bit of a haze. My close friend and roommate of several years died over the summer before my senior year and I just didn’t know what to do with myself. The plan for grad school dissipated. I just tried to get jobs, any kind of jobs I could get with my degree. I floated around a bit doing temp jobs until Kelly Services planted me at a call center.

I’m not going to lie - it sucks to work there. It really does. On the flip side, if you can survive, you can get promoted quickly, learn a lot of new things and then pursue other areas. If you are ambitious, you can see quick results. The thing is, you have to last that long. For me, having a regular job which was reasonably secure and where I could achieve the goals of the job was less stressful than holding out for something else.

The worst type of call center job to end up on is telemarketing or any kind of sales. The second worst is the rote manual thing - where basically you read from scripts 100% of the time, annoying people by having to repeat the same upsell 1,000 times a day, like just taking orders from a catalog all day. Those blow. I never had to do those, but I heard stories.

The next tier up is entry level customer service, where it’s still mostly scripts and it’s still carefully timed but you do get to put a bit of yourself in your work. Sometimes you’ll have interesting or funny callers and it can be OK, sometimes you’ll get utter dickfaces and it will blow. It depends a lot on the center. Ours was pretty hardcore about stats but not as much as some places I’ve seen. It all depends on the day though. We faced heavy contractual penalties for not meeting guidelines, so on one day, you might be given the third degree for taking an unscheduled bathroom break or having a call last a few minutes too long, but on most days it was a little more tolerant.

Here’s the thing with this. Taking call after call after call all day will wear on anyone. It doesn’t matter who you are, getting the next caller the instant the previous hung up for hours on end is just soul-destroying. It burns you out. Fortunately, our center wasn’t always plagued with long queues (long hold times, which create this condition) but there was, say, an 8 month period where it was like this pretty much all the time. Plus there was mandatory overtime every week you had to do. We were understaffed constantly and hemorrhaging people. It really blew, and this was a pretty dark time for everyone. Fortunately I got promoted during this time, which was challenging too, but I wasn’t on the phone constantly. Even supervisors and support staff might be called on during particularly bad times, though.

Supervising was difficult in a whole different way. Imagine your performance being totally driven by an average of your staff, but half your staff quits every month and are replaced by people you didn’t interview or train. Despite my manager telling me verbally that I was a top supervisor, my actual performance reviews were no better than average because of conditions in the center. This meant crap raises and no bonuses, of course. It also meant that, because I was pretty good at my job, that I’d get saddled with a lot of committees and projects because I wouldn’t fuck it up. On the other hand, when something good finally came along (a tech support project) I got to dump my department and go do that. So it did pay off in the end.

After moving to a tech support project, some bad stuff went down with some new management and I eventually just had to get out. After looking for a job for a long time, I decided to apply for a job for basic help desk just because the ad seemed so nice and friendly. Turns out it was for a little software house. It was like night and day. People were nicer to you because you were easy to reach and knew what you were doing. Developers would listen to you. Software problems would get fixed.

It wasn’t always great of course, and we’ve come a long way as a company (in fact I left for a 9 month period due to pay, but they brought me back later with a major bump after a change in ownership), but I’m happy even though at the end of the day I’m still doing a lot of basic help desk stuff. It’s just not a grind. Most of my day actually ends up on the software testing end, and I get a lot of input about the implementation of features and things like that. It’s gratifying to see little signs of yourself all through a product, and it makes it easy to support of course as well.

The long-term plan is to hopefully move into full time QA someday, but honestly I’m pretty happy where I’m at, so I don’t really plan to go anywhere. Even though I still do my fair share of basic tech support or pre-sales calls, it doesn’t feel anything like working in a call center. I have the authority to handle situations as I see fit. Nobody gives me a hard time for spending a long time on a call. I don’t have any bullshit scripts to follow, and I’m not called over because my shoes don’t fit some precise definition in the dress code. I’m compensated fairly, I get a good amount of time off (and they don’t play games with me actually trying to take it), and I can go to anyone in the company at all and speak my mind. They don’t make me work Thanksgiving or Christmas just because some r-tard might decide to call about something utterly insignificant and non-urgent. At the end of the day, directly helping customers is a perfectly honorable and valuable way of spending your time, and one that adds a huge amount of value to any organization – it’s just that so many companies treat their support staff otherwise. Most customer service or tech support staff are treated as inferiors, and as replaceable cogs in a wheel who add no value but only add costs. And that’s why working in most call centers sucks.

11

A little over seven years, working at an insurance company. I took the job after college, when I was engaged, because I wanted to move out of my parents’ house as soon as possible. Life intervened, and I stayed in the job for way, way longer than I had played.

In terms of performance, I was quite good at my job. I took calls quickly, and gave good assistance. I knew the systems, knew each of the umpteen-bajillion products we serviced, and could remain perky for hours on end. I knew how to get things done with other departments. Sometimes, if I ended up with a lot of problem calls, I’d get a little overwhelmed, but other than that, it was easy, and I was good at it.

The benefits were good. My pay was, for a call center worker, quite good. I liked the people I worked with; our department had years of having a low turnover rate. We kicked ass.

Let me tell you, though–there is something absolutely soul-crushing about answering to the demands of anywhere from sixty to a hundred-and-twenty different bosses each day. There is something insanely demoralizing about the attitude of callers who assume that, since you are answering phones, you’re an idiot with no ambition. There’s something maddening about trying to explain to a financial advisor (who likely makes far more than you do, albeit on commission) the arcane and esoteric concept of daily interest compounding. Moreover, though the people I worked directly with were almost universally awesome, we went from being a home office to being acquired and becoming a satellite office. There was almost no upward mobility available locally; empty positions weren’t replaced half the time.

Eventually, I got to the point where I realized that I could either continue to work there for the rest of my life, answering phones, growing ever-fatter from stress and physical inactivity and generalized I-don’t-give-a-fuck-itis, or I could leave, get my life in order, and take a chance. I did that a little over two months ago, and, though the idea of being voluntarily unemployed in this economy is positively petrifying, I currently couldn’t be happier with the decision I’ve made.

So, as to whether there are opportunities for upward advancement–that really depends on the company. I imagine that, if you work customer service for a long period of time in a particular industry, then that knowledge can be carried over to other jobs in that sector. Some people in our call center went on to try to become financial advisors; others worked non-telephone customer service for local agents. Like you, I couldn’t imagine doing it for the rest of my life, but I think some people can. The job gets left behind when you go home; it doesn’t usually require you to rush in at 10 AM on a Saturday because of an emergency; it doesn’t work on commission, and (at least at my job) you had a nice, set schedule.

I wouldn’t do it again, though. By the last few months, when we’d taken on more calls than our department could handle, and were just breaking into tax season, I was having nightmares about customers calling my cell phone. It wasn’t any way for me to live.

12

I worked 6 years in the call center for an office supply company, and have been inside sales/tech support for a company in another industry for 5 years.

I enjoyed managing people in the call center. Being on the phones, not so much. Up until a month ago, I was handling $2 million in sales, and had a fallout with my boss (long story), and was transferred to tech support. I expect to burn out within a year, as I’m taking 50-80 calls a day, up from maybe 20.

Still, it pays the bills.

13

Wow, I feel very lucky compared to some others here when it comes to my work environment. It’s pretty informal, there are no scripts, and when the other temps and I get good, we’ll be expected to average 30 calls a day, and I think senior techs are expected to average 40.
So it’s not the soul sucking hell hole a lot of help desk places are thank goodness.

14

I did eight years as a nurse doing health education in a call center. About 70% of the job was outbound and 30% was inbound - we did both. The nurses didn’t do cold calls, this was a health plan benefit and people either called us or knew we would be calling them. Even so, we worked on a dialer and had metrics we were responsible for. I watched what had been a good, relaxed, fun place to work gradually change to a sweatshop with horrendous morale; the company in question has a big contract about to end, and in a desperate effort to keep the customer started micromanaging more and more.

I just started a new job for an insurance company. It’s going to be phone calls again, but no dialer, and I’m learning new skills, including case management, internal integration of services, triage, and more. No more delivering canned disease management scripts. It’s something I can get a case management certification from, eventually, and the benefits are a heck of a lot better. We’ll see how things turn out.

15

I’ve worked in support for software for eight years and have been a senior rep for several years. There are opportunities to move to other positions, but I like what I do for the most part.

16

I’ve been doing software customer support at my current place for nearly 10 years. The lower level techs take live customer calls but I’ve progressed to the point that I only look after the top tier customers and don’t even have an ACD phone on my desk.

17

I worked for 3 years at a call center/help desk for what was then known as EDS. It wasn’t a bad job, but it wasn’t the best job I ever had either.

The biggest negative was that the management got so concerned about handling call volume that they would conveniently “forget” when people had a vacation scheduled so that when they were ready to leave for the next week, they would cancel it and then say, “Oh, we didn’t know you were going to be gone next week and we already have too many people off… So we will need you in next week.” This happened too many times for me to count, and people were scheduling their vacations a year in advance and still getting screwed. So I decided to play the psychological card. Every cubicle had a white board. So I started keeping a countdown to my vacation on it. As I got closer to my vacation, the numbers started getting larger in size until the week before vacation, they were as large as the board itself. I also made a big deal about where I was going and what I’d be doing while I was gone. This way management couldn’t use the excuse that they didn’t know I was going to be gone. I never had a problem going on vacations.

The nice thing about working there was that it was a great way to get my foot in the door for working in the IT industry. They trained me on all the software I would be supporting, how to troubleshoot problems, and also on proper phone etiquette. When I left, I was easily the best at what I did. Those customer skills easily transferred to my current job of onsite tech support for the school I work for.

18

Haha that reminds me, I have nightmares every week or so that I’m at a non-work-related function (like a family party or a pool party or barbecue) and I’m having to frantically take claim calls while everyone around me is having fun and being loud and I can barely hear it. I hate it x_x

19

Altogether, I’ve worked in call centers for over 15 years: and I have to say I love it. I’ve done tech support, customer service, QA, and just got promoted to Supervisor over a week ago. I’m in a good industry (healthcare distributor) with great people and management who gives a darn about you. Customer service is in my blood.

I’m staying with this company until retirement, at least. They’ve been very good to us.

20

I worked specifically in a Call Center for about 20 months but also had a lot of experience working in Dispatch for an alarm company and a copier repair company and as a receptionist at a public housing program. After about a year of the call center, I couldn’t answer the phone at home any more. I was so damn tired of it all. But it was the call center job that launched me sideways into my current career and true calling. I am an instructional designer. I get to help people but I don’t have to talk to them all the time.