I’ve been doing it on two different jobs for nearly 3 years now.
It is my own little Hell On Earth and I want to stop doing it soon.
I’ve spent over 10 years of my working life either as a telemarketer (I was a pretty good salesman) or working in or supervising call centers. After getting promoted out of my last 2 year stint answering phones, I’ve added that job to restaurant work as stuff I refuse to ever do again. I’m a very polite, fairly soft-spoken person, so I have a low tolerance for being cussed at and disrespected. I’m not sure what’s broken in society that makes people think they can treat someone answering their phone call worse than dirt. I did get a lot of plusses from my experience. Regardless of position, I am to this day very customer-focused. Also, my call center work has given me the skills to get my own service problems resolved.
Bri2k
Reported as spam.
My first job out of university was about 6 months of tech support for cable modems, then XP Home. I didn’t mind it for a number of reasons… I was stagnating trying ineptly to find a better job, the job market was poor at the time, it let me meet a different group of people than I normally would, and I got to speak to actual end users, which I try to remember when I’m writing software nowadays.
We had (very) short breaks between calls to finish writing up the calls, which I think helped it not suck as bad as some here describe. I agree that when your phone started to ring the moment you finished speaking to the last customer was… frustrating.
I was very surprised at the jobs some coworkers jumped at the chance to do. We had a team meeting one day, and they needed a dozen people to call customers who hadn’t ordered TV on-demand ever, ask if they knew how to use it, and if not, schedule someone else to call them about it. Not even teach them to use the remote, just schedule a call. That anyone would willingly do something so mindmeltingly dull 7 hours a day boggled my mind.
Near the end, I started disliking it enough to take a much more active role in finding a career, rather than a job, which was helpful. Given my education and abilities, I’d consider any more than that a waste of time, but I can’t say I regret my time there.
I lasted three and a half years in the joint before I couldn’t take it any longer. Never again.
I worked in two different call centers in that time. One in directory assistance and one in insurance. Some (but a VERY few in my experience and the experience of people I know) call centers are okay places to work…not fantastic, unless you reeeeally like talking to people constantly all day long, but bearable. Most are not. Call centers are notorious for very high staff turnover and terrible morale and most call center employees tend to drink and smoke a lot…there is a reason for these things.
Most call centers are VERY, VERY high pressure (and even more so if you’re working in an emergency services or 911-type role or child services or something like that where emotional stress in inherently part of the job on top of the fact it’s a call center). You have stats to maintain, average handling time, etc plus the quality of the call and the ability to pretend you haven’t already spoken to 500 people that day, especially when you get an angry caller. The absolute worst is anything to do with collections or sales and most especially telemarketing and “retentions” (read: glorified telemarketing), and places that are actually operated on a dialler system for outbound calls - ie, you don’t actually place your outbound calls yourself, the computer dials it for you automatically once you’ve finished your last call, so it’s essentially inbound, except that the person you’re calling didn’t call you and probably isn’t interested in talking to you, especially if you’re trying to sell them something and/or collect an overdue payment. On a dialler, you are lucky if you get to take a breath between calls. And the majority of call centers are very tyrannical about bathroom breaks, etc. During your work hours, you are chained to your desk (not literally, but it may as well be). You would probably get more freedom in the military. Really.
As has been said above, the ability to get out of there depends on the size of the company and available opportunities to progress (as with any job) and the industry you’re in. After painfully making it through a year and a half in insurance “retentions” (ie ringing people up - well, the dialler did that - to collect overdue payments or discourage people from leaving, and trying to upsell 'em while I was at it :mad:), I was able to play up my “finance industry experience” and score a job doing back-office operations in a bank - finally, no phones! 
I was so desperate to leave the insurance company that despite the economy, I quit my job before I’d even had the final interview! :eek: I figured if I didn’t get it, there was always cleaning toilets and mopping floors… (I actually applied for more than 60 jobs in an attempt to get out of that place. I even applied at a donut shop. I was willing to do just about anything else.)
Rant over. deep breath And most of us come out with emotional scars…
I’ve worked in call centers since 2006. First was a charitable company, with the outbound dialer, calling people to collect donations for various charities. I actually didn’t mind the work, and I was very good at it, consistantly in the top 25 reps in all 3 call centers owned by the same company (averaging 71-150 employees in each one) What I didn’t like was the class of people that worked there- nodrug testing was done, and drug use was rampant. I once walked in on a drug deal in one of the conference rooms. I did not feel safe there at all. My van was vandalized in the parking lot twice.
From there I went to American General, again doing outbound call from a dialer, checkign with customers to see if they wanted another loan. Loved this job. It was a ‘higher quality’ employee, and again, I was good at it. Was laid off when AmGen crashed in 2009.
I now work in an in-bound center for a large cell phone company which shall go unnamed. It is the hardest, highest stress job I have ever worked and I hate it. It pays well, good benefits, etc so I tolerate it, but any job that makes you cry almost daily and leaves you sick to the stomach can’t be good for you. I, too, have nightmares about the place. I live in fear that I am gona be fired. Just last week I had a customer call me an incompetant piece of shit because I was reading her one of the company policies directly from my computer screen. We have to just sit there and take the verbal abuse and are not allowed to say anything in return.
It is mental torture of the worst kind.
Many of the cases here are reminiscent of my work in different call centers-
Luckily I am currently in at the beginning of the creation of the current call center & customer service environment, and while we have some customers being difficult and workplace rules changing often, we are still working out the bugs and mostly get to handle the issues as we need to in the most efficent way for each of us. This is changing, as much of our work is becoming scripted, but we are able to assist with creating the scripts, so that helps. Call volume is very variable, and can range from 20-30 calls on a very slow day, to well over 100 on a busy day.
I have worked at 411 information lines for cell phones where time limits of 30 to 60 seconds were optimal, and call volume was expected to be between 400-600 calls per day- no choice to avoid the call, as it would ring directly as soon as the customer hung up. Which software and information we could give depended on the customer plan, and we only knew which was which by the automated voice answer that would state, as the call rolled in, “Thank you for calling XYZ information- what City and State, please?” We then had rote text to read from the screen, and any deviation, even of a single word, if we were being monitored, would result in a writeup.
My current job is much 'better/easier/nicer/ - but the percentage of customers I am able to assist is much lower than previously. Now people want to be upset, and this is the number they call to yell, while at the other job, customers simply wanted to know wah to do and then disconnect.
My worst call was when someone obviously misdialled 411 instead of 911, and I got to hear the customer screaming, pleading for help, and then someone yelling out to put the damn phone down, meaty thuds, then crunch and no more call online. Being 411, we had no gps tracking, and we had no ability to transfer calls- so I couldn’t transfer to 911, although that would likely only have had ‘my’ number show up…
If we had a supervisor escalation, the supervisor had to come talk to us, or plug his own headset into our computer.
Missed the edit-
I didn’t mention or detail my years in telemarketing, surveys, or other such cold-calling ventures.
Totally different animal, and horrible things and horrible people who can do them for significant lengths of time.
I cannot deal with those people on the answering end of the phone calls.
I was never a call center employee, but I worked with a large insurance company in their training and documentation department. Three of my co-workers started in the call center and moved into training or technical writing when there was an opening and were found to be a good fit. Most of the other departments were also staffed from the call center - it was viewed very much as a place to get started. The company preferred hiring from within; moving to different departments seemed fairly easy.
However, because of that environment and the fact that call center work generally sucks, there was a lot of turnover. We had new hire classes running constantly. Those that could put up with the BS and put in good work had a great chance of moving on to something else. Those that didn’t were usually gone in a year, maybe two.