Send me your art!
I know that you draw. I know that, while you sit taking calls all day the only form of unscripted self-expression that remains to you is the biro and note pad by your keyboard. I know that some of you are even art graduates. In my various roles in call centres I produced a wide range of artworks. I made a sculpture from matchsticks and tipex. I designed a quasi-facist team badge. I made posters of the company founder smiling benificently down on us like some latter day Stalin. I used MS Paint and Powerpoint to make animated films. (No, seriously). I used Outlook to forge emails from the TL telling other agents they were fired. (I was young, foolish)
Stuff like this you know? It's all good.
Now I also know that you all have access to email accounts and camera phones so I'm going to ask you a huge favour. Please, please, please take photgraphs of your best doodles with your camera phones and email them to the following address. I guarantee anonymity and i'll never use the images for publication anywhere other than this blog without permission. Let's make this a gallery to be proud of! The best images of the week will be posted every Friday.
sendstory@pleasebearwithme.co.uk
Yeah, not sure what they’re on about either…
I'm going to need to learn Italian for this one. However I love the slickster call centre manager in the white suit, and the beardy psychotherapist looks intriguing too. I like the whole mental health angle.
By the way if you are having mental health issues do go and see someone because you can get time off and it's the one thing the fuckers can't fire you for. At least in the countries i've worked in anyway.
Black Balled
I found myself of late, begging the gate keepers of a certain global brand to let me in to their vast call centre down the road. It's been a few years since I had to interview for a call centre but my god things have changed. I just failed two consecutive interviews to sit and handle some weak ass inbound customer services line with a meagre 50 calls a day per agent. I could do it in my sleep.
Are you fucking serious?
So what the fuck is up? Is it true that the crisis has created a job market wherein hundreds of crack call-ops are competing for the same entry level jobs? Or do they see something different in me? Do they smell the acrid stench of self respect that now clings to me after the last year and a half of doing proper, meaningful work. Were they concerned about the employment record that clearly shows me voluntarily quitting a call centre job and successfully doing something better. I tried to make it clear that I have no other choice but they didn't believe me.
Here is an example of my interview banter:
"Yeah I get a buzz out of helping someone, quickly and efficiently. I'm intrisically motivated. I'm more interested in delivering quality customer service than financial incentives. I want to be on the best team in the room."
As you can see by this undignified spluttering, I genuinely am desperate. So how can I appear more desperate in an interview? I never had any trouble breezing into such jobs before. Please advise me in the comments section.
Oh and here is some feedback...
Interview 1 - He took a little bit too long to answer the competency questions. (Describe a specific phone call you took two years ago.)
Interview 2 - He mentioned that he might want to not be a call-op for the rest if his life, and this is a 'permanent position' (A six month temp contract with possible lead to a permanent role.)
I'm sure you can use this feedback to hone your own interview skills.
Many thanks,
El Capitan Tupelo
I Stole This Article off Schnews. Sue me.
http://www.schnews.org.uk/archive/news247.htm
You can read the article in it's original home by following the link. Otherwise it's right here padding out the content and buying me time to write something original. And you should probably discover Schnews anyway as it's an excellent publication.
RINGPEACE
“You feel like you are on a galley boat – being watched, answering calls every 30 seconds, monitored and told off if there are mistakes” Dougie Rafferty, (ex) Excell call centre worker
“I feel absolutely knackered like a total zombie, can’t be bothered speaking to anyone, I go home and I just want to sleep” Anonymous Excell call centre worker
They’ve been described as the “modern day sweatshops” with “battery hen” working conditions. Yet one in fifty people now work in the them. Welcome to the world of the Call Centre.
SchNEWS is used to hearing about dodgy companies but Arizona-based multinational Excell multimedia LLC really takes the biscuit. They run two call centres in Glasgow employing more than 600 operators who deal with things like directory enquiries and 999. Starting their jobs on a pocket bulging £9,000 a year, company documents show that the company aim for operators to be on the phone for 97% of the time. This means staff must answer the phone twice a minute for over seven hours a day, ask the manager for a drink of water, and make up lost time at the end of a shift if they spend too much time in the loo. And all the time closely monitored.
When Channel 4 spilled the beans on this bunch of dodgy bastards, they uncovered one story of a man who had an epileptic fit while at work and was taken to hospital after cutting his head. When his pay slip came through, the company had deducted three hours for the time he spent in the hospital! This then had a knock on affect on his attendance record, costing him more than two hundred quid in lost wages.
Of course the firm don’t take criticism lying down and sacked Dougie Rafferty, and have threatened one woman member of staff with “facial mapping” to prove that she was not the anonymous employee who dared to criticise them on TV!
But surely with the new Trade Union laws Call Centres and the like aren’t gonna get away with acting like latter day scrooges? Under the law if 50% of staff get together and want to join a union then employees have an obligation to recognise them. There’s just one small snag. As one former Excell manager pointed out, thanks to massive turnover in staff, it’s unlikely that there‘ll ever be the numbers needed to come to any agreement. And while people try to organise or speak out against their work conditions, they’ll just be shown the door. In other words, “don’t call us we’ll call you.”
Bunch of BT Balls…
British Telecom is the third largest company in the UK (after BP Amoco and Glaxo Wellcome) and the fifth largest telecommunication company in the world. Its last annual report in 1998 revealed £4.3 billion in profits, or £136 a second, and they have operations in over 230 countries from Indonesia to Eastern Europe.
Chief Executive Sir Peter Bonfield earns £2.53 million pounds a year, a pay rise of over £1 million. SchNEWS wonders how he manages. In June 1999, 120 workers were sacked from their jobs at the Directory Inquiries call centre in Stirling due to “regrettable advancements in technology” (Daily Record 6/7/99). The following week Glasgow telemarketing phone operators had their commission rates slashed from £4.50 an hour to £2.50 to boost profits and attract more business investment. BT recruits the majority of its staff from employment agencies like Manpower and Blue Arrow.
With a flexible workforce, no contracts, sick pay or holiday pay, BT is a New Labour model of corporate modernity - putting profit before employment rights. All BT telephone operators and Customer Service Advisors are monitored and timed for the amount of calls taken in a shift. If employees do not meet Call Handling Time targets of one call every 180 seconds, then they are disciplined, refused overtime, and in some cases sacked. Calls are routinely recorded and listened to from a remote call centre in Coventry, where if an employee is caught swearing or hanging up they are immediately sacked and escorted from the building.
* Got a gripe against call centres – then why not share your story with SchNEWS?
Inspiration From Our Comrades in Argentina
Recognise the logo?
¿Quien Habla? Lucha Contra La Esclavitud del Alma En Los Call Centers
(Who's talking? Struggle against the slavery of the soul in the call centres)
It takes a latin way of seeing to come up with a title like this one. Unlike us limey anglo saxons who mince words and make light of our own misery in Argentina they know oppression when they see it and they know what to call it too. Of course our brothers and sisters in the call centres of Argentina do not have the luxury of mild discontent, their wages are half of ours and the cost of living is almost the same. So no wonder then that their way of talking about Call Centre life is more overtly radical than ours tends to be.
I found this book in a radical bookshop in BCN and being overjoyed to see that the logo was exactly the same as mine I took it as an omen that I should continue this blog after all.
If you speak Spanish then buy this book! If not then don't worry because I have dozens of blog posts to write about it and I will translate quotes as I go.
From what I've read so far it's a strong piece of collective writing drawn from the experiences of a range of workers. However most of them are university graduates and they tend to write strongly marxist flavoured writing which might be difficult for an un-initiated reader to follow. However, it's a book with a lot of heart and one that becomes ever more relevant as the European economies start to resemble the Argentinian one more and more by the year.
And hey! Smile!
Their crisis is our opportunity.
xxx
El Capitan Tupelo
Don’t hang up on me!
I know I haven't got any readers yet so the title is somewhat inappropriate however if I've learnt anything from my girl's highly succesful blog - this shit takes time to develop. So I thought it would be interesting to put up my plan for developing this blog over the next six months so that everyone can see just how hilariously inaccurate or not it may prove to be.
I've taken a long walk through the garden of project doubt, and the doubt that keeps coming back is this one: maybe it's too late for me to write about call centres as it's been years now since I worked in one and the memories are growing stale. However, doubt is usually just fucking doubt and I sat down today to see if I could brainstorm a direction to take this in and I think it's going to work after all.
So here is the plan. I have generated about fifty different seeds of ideas to work into mini articles for the blog. These seeds will all involve research and hopefully create some interesting connections and uncover some thus far unseen angles. Here's a pic of the brainstorming session right here:
A brainstorm.
I'm now thinking that the blog will serve as a focus for writing real life stuff, thoughts and opinions about call centres with some autobiographical elements. The book will be shelved (ouch) until further notice but I think it might end up being pure fiction.
From September onwards I will aim to post weekly (for practical reasons I can't start yet) for at least six months. This will mean alternating short articles with interviews and community building activities like larks, japes and competitions. So the likelyhood is that you'll only read this post if you have some burning desire to read the whole backlog. If it works and I like it and at least some other people like it then I'll start working on the book.
Thanks for reading.
The Daily Mash on Call Centres | Mr Blackett
The Daily Mash on Call Centres | Mr Blackett.
I used to think Mr Blackett was a miserabilist, but recently he put me right on that. He is actually a romantic, broken hearted by the relentless, bloody minded stupidity of everyday life in 21st century, post-imperial, post-industrial, late-capitalist Britain.
His thoughts on the call centre experience are ably and succintly expressed in this bitter sweet blog post linked above. Highly recommended.
You'll also find a link on his blog to the Daily Mash article that inspired his post. So this is a post about a post about a post.
This post-modernism in action people. Get on the fucking train.
Although I agree with Blackett's essential message (walk out, do it now.), I think I have a slightly different mission here. I realised after reading this post that I want to reach out to the people who feel that they can't quit, not yet anyway, and give them some catharsis.
So basically that means I'm going to try and be funnier.
Kisses, losers.
The English
I had the fortune of working in an international call-centre on a UK team. During my time there I learned some revealing things about ‘The English’ as seen through the eyes of other nations. In particular, through the ears of the poor Dutch and German agents who frequently had to take UK overflow.
When a channel is taking more calls than predicted those calls are known as overflow, and they can be directed to a reserves team of agents to soak up the damage. The Dutch, being both fluent in English and not very busy were the usual victims of this frequent event.
Conversations in the smoking room revealed the special fear and loathing that non uk agents reserved for our clients.
“I used to think the English were classy” I heard.
I laughed openly, coughing up a lung in the process. It seems that James Bond and Hello magazine still have the world fooled about us. You fools!
"They're so mean!" Came another, cute little Dutch accent in a strop.
And on reflection it was true. English clients do 'expect a high standard of customer service', which translated simply means that they want to be worshipped like a god every time they spend some of their soft earned cash. Perhaps this is because most of the English work in Customer Services?
So there it is. I just wanted to point out that the English were the clients who acted like big babies more of the time than any of the other nationalities.
Hey, let's give a shout out to the perfectly lovely majority but remember, the loud, spoilt and aggressive minority tend to get remembered.
Peace xxx
Fun With Headsets
The headset clamps onto your skull like an oversized hair clip, and if your lucky, some cushioning remains on the parts that make contact with your heed. If not then you simply grow your hair longer. You've got time. Never surrender a decent headset to anyone, not even on loan. Guard it jealously, hide it in your draw (under the untouched files containing all that super useful info they gave you in the training room), when you clock off.
What is a decent headset? Volume is the key. If you can hear your caller loud and clear then the rest is just cosmetics. It doesn't matter if it looks like it's been constructed from bubble gum and paper clips so long as you can actually hear your punters. Nothing is worse than telling 100 people a day to shout because you can't hear them.
Now focus on this next piece of information, it could save your life...
You can't stop them hearing you by putting your hand over the mic. They're twenty times more sensitive than you think. Yes your caller can hear the person sitting next to you shouting motherfucker. I know this from experience. I was the guy shouting motherfucker. It was relevant in context, I stand by the remark.
Finally, know this. The long spiral, rubbery part of the wire that connects you to the phone has a longer reach than you realise. You can walk around quite freely but more importantly you can play amusing games. You can spin around on your wheely chair as many times as possible before the cable finally gives way or you asphyxiate. The first person to Fail in this instance is a loser. Alternatively you can play dodgems with the chairs. Balloon tennis works well.
Anyway you get the frikkin idea noob, now get the hell away from my desk before I steal your shiny new Senheisser headset. And don't tell me your name. You don't get a name till you've done a twelve day shift block. That is twelve sequential days schmuck. And by that I do mean late shifts.
Peace, losers.
Hey Buddy!
In which one person silently listens in to your telephone call. Creepy eh? Think about that next time you phone for an insurance quote.
I recall that my first real ‘buddy’ was a little, round, rosy-cheeked girl, not long out of her teens called Lianne. (I’m harking back here so the details may be recklessly inaccurate. I can’t refute with absolute certainty the possibility that she was a tall blonde Swedish chap of fifty called Eric.)
I put on my headset for the first time and it felt awkward and strange and conspicuous. I was nervous, we’d had less than an hour in the training room and suddenly we were there on the front line. We were half a dozen new starters scattered around the small room and settling in with all the usual hassles of not having enough seats or headsets to go around etcetera.
Buddying is in theory the final stage of call centre training. (In my first call centre job it was the only phase of the training.) The phones in a call centre have two sockets for headsets so that a trainee can shadow an experienced call op, listening to their live calls and watching how the operative uses the computer system to retrieve information. The trainee will usually then practice operating the system while the experienced agent does the voice.
Here we see the happy trainee, under the protective wing of an elite agent.
The first thing that strikes you as a rookie in the call centre is the loss of control over the machine itself. It doesn’t ring; it just automatically patches calls through. There is no mental breathing space in which to say to oneself ‘Ooh, the phone is ringing. I think I shall answer it.’ What actually happens is that a beep is heard and without further warning the client is there, listening.
Lianne was not fazed by this however. Her salutation came fast and smooth like the well repeated mantra it was. Within seconds the caller was funnelled through a series of questions that resulted in her file appearing on the computer screen. Lianne deftly reassured the woman that her kitchen would arrive within a certain period of time. Job done. Next caller...
I soon realised that it barely mattered to most callers what the computer said. After an hour or two of buddying it was clear that Lianne’s job was basically to hit some keys, invent a reasonable time frame in which the client’s kitchen would probably arrive and then swiftly persuade the customer that this was all exactly as it should be and everyone involved should be very happy about it.
I was taking calls by the afternoon.
Some time later I was the experienced agent and I must admit that I enjoyed helping to train new starters. It broke the monotony, offered the opportunity to chat and made you feel like a battle hardened veteran. Buddying always involved war stories and call ops love swapping them. (Except for Lianne who was a little short on conversational skills bless her.)
Question Time:
Do you remember losing your buddy virginity? Who was your first buddy and how did the experience go? Did they break you in gently?