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I worked in not one but two call-centers during a very dark time of my life. I say freaking bomb all call-centers out of existence. They create crap jobs, with crap pay, and crap benefits that steal work from better qualified people. In the first call-center I worked in, I was doing financial support for customers. I was great at my job because I was studying finance at that time in my life. Everyone else on the 200+ team (excluding this very smart girl that came from a crappy neighborhood with crappy parents) were complete and utter retards. The place was a petri dish of fraud, bad advice, and foul phone manners. In the second call-center I worked in two departments. The first one was sales, basically 300 kids just out of school tricking customers into promotions they did not want and hanging up on clients when they couldn't get a credit card number. I was also great at sales because I developed a system, without bullshitting the customers. I always hit the bonuses... but the rest of the department also hit them, with 500% my performance. Imagine I sold 10 units per day to hit 60 units a week (the bonus being after 50 units sold), they sold 300. Fraud to the extreme (and I know this because a close friend of mine did this... his whole team did). Lastly I did tech support. I was probably one of the few (less than 10) people that actually understood the technology. The rest of the 120 strong department where tech illiterate. Aside, I strongly remember one agent being fired because he brought two machetes into the office building and cut (superficially, no horror story here) some dude's arm, and a 45 year old lady agent that reported 13 cases of sexual assault (the lady was hideous looking and was just looking for an easy payday) which got the 13 men fired and which ended with her resignation which included a severance pay of several thousand dollars. They funniest side, is that at least 60% of all the agents I met, could not speak or even comprehend decent english. I thought that might be a prerequisite to do customer support/sales for english speaking customers. In comparison, I was once reprimanded for speaking french to the french speaking husband of a customer about their tech equipment. So yeah, I say bomb all these call-centers. I don't live in the US, but I think that those sales agent jobs dealing with people in the US should be filled with US sales agents. Those tech support jobs for US customers should be filled with US college kids or recent graduates. Instead companies pay 300~400 dollars a month to a bunch of retards (I can count myself in this group, though give me a break I had been kicked out of my house so I took the first job I was offered), cheats, and thieves, so they can go ahead and make your experience on the phone a living hell. |
I made a few hundred dollars in off-the-books employment for a borderline psychopath who nearly killed me with a pipe to the head. Following poorly planned unemployment brought on by the pipe incident, I got a job at a call center for an office supply company (the kind that sells things like, I don't know, staples). I remember those years pretty fondly: they paid me what I was owed in a timely fashion, no pipes were thrown at my head, I touched no toxic chemicals in a hot warehouse, and it was a value-creating job which I was good at for a wee bit of time prior to going to bigger and better things.