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?

The Accidental Call Centre Manager

In which we encounter an unlikely yet fitting leader of call ops.

Cubicles? Luxury!

John was a short, brutal specimen of a man with a glint in his eye that betrayed intelligence. It was a calculated mind he had and one that the unwary might, at first meeting, fail to see in him. Bred of hardy Yorkshire stock with the gruff manner and curt way of speaking of such men, he had carved respect for himself at a young age in the business of haulage and logistics no doubt through a combination of stalwart dependability and a starkly practical grasp of the facts. At heart, John was a manly man and had little time for the girlish business of ‘communication’ which made him the natural choice for a call centre manager.

John was no business school graduate. It sometimes seemed as if he had stumbled into the wrong building by accident. We all assumed that his appointment had been due to familial ties. Perhaps his uncle was an executive at Skynet* Kitchens. He had however, the two most important qualities a call centre manager required: he was feared and distrusted by the call ops. Well, maybe there was some respect there too. He was mad enough to try and set up a call centre with no apparent support from whoever had the damn fool idea in the first place.

Like most call centres, nobody was ever really sure who they were working for. It was possible to deduce that the centre had been the brainchild of a probably boozy meeting between execs from the kitchen manufacturers and the haulage company. The premise was simple. Fill a room with call ops and give the phone number to all clients expecting delivery of a kitchen. When said kitchens fail to arrive on time the clients can vent their frustrations indefinitely on the helpless call ops thus leaving the delivery company completely free of suffering any direct repercussions for failing to hit their service targets.

It was genius. And in many ways it is the premise behind most call-centres today. But this, the first one I experienced, was special. There was never any pretence. It was known to all that our capacity to assist was non-existent. We couldn’t tell people when their kitchen would arrive. We didn’t know where the kitchen was. We couldn’t even ask anybody who did know. It was hardly worth entering the clients name into the computer. And yet, it was pure. It was unashamed of its purpose as a business. We were a human firewall, filtering out the misery, anger and disappointment of the customers and thereby saving the precious time of real people with proper jobs.

It was in that draughty prefab, tacked onto the side of the warehouse on an industrial estate in Co. Durham that I learned the craft.

*Some names have been altered due to the archaic and repressive libel laws of Great Britain.

They don’t know they’re born

In which a youth of great promise and little delivery veers off the fairways of life and into the rough of the customer services industry...

I was born believing that the world owed me a living, as they say. Although of course what they mean by that is that I am indolent and reprehensible and maybe I am both of those. I do not seek your approval, but maybe your indulgence. For I am spoilt, of that at least I am certain. And after all, this is a comedy of sorts. It is full of the kind of sadness that begs for cruel laughter because it is the misfortune of the naive and self-serving. I pray you take it for what it is: an entertainment at our expense, a blood-sport, a piece of ‘reality fiction’.

Sally and Tom didn't even work in a call-centre. They just loved the style.

I was cursed with a lucid far-sightedness as a child and I was all too aware of the life by design I was becoming involved in through my education. I knew what they wanted us to become; I saw them sift us into bands and prepare us for our social roles. I could feel the palpable misery of adult life beckoning and I sought with all my wit to avoid it.

I believed that somehow I would be able to evade the fate of my peers. I vowed that I would not enter the world of work and sell the precious hours of my life for a fistful of silver coins. The idea was physically disgusting to me. However, beyond these grand sentiments I never managed to concoct a workable plan. All I had was my noble refusal; my fantasies were always of glorious failure.

Of course I had no grasp of reality. And so I fled to the last refuge in our society for such men: University. There I discovered escape in abundance. I decorated my refusal with the ideas of great thinkers and rebels. I dressed myself in Karl Marx and Guy Debord. I fancied myself an avant-garde, an artist without portfolio paid by the fates to discover new ways of seeing for the good of all society. At the time I didn’t realise that this miraculous third way was an illusion built on personal debt and the undue generosity of my Father and Mother.

The inevitable catastrophe of graduation came too soon. What I had thought was my life, my world and my work turned out to be no more than a course. Suddenly the real world was knocking on my door. What could I do? I didn’t know. I still had nothing but my refusal and my in depth knowledge of avant-garde political theatre. So I thought, if I must work I shall take a job of little importance, a temporary position while I think of what to do next.

Listen carefully to that thought for it is the key to all that follows...

“I’ll just get a temporary job while I get my head together and figure out my next move.”

My Generation, 1990-Present

I knew about call centres before I ever set foot in one. I had heard of the practice of cold-calling of course. I myself had joyously insulted call-ops for making unsolicited sales calls to my parent’s house. Those poor bastards with their miserable list of phone numbers and their humiliating outbound sales scripts, they never really deserved it. But didn’t we all take a malicious pleasure in shooting them down back then? (At that time the practice of outbound telesales had reached a zenith in the UK which later abated as online spam flourished in its place.)

"Good afternoon sir, may I speak with the homeowner?"

So when I registered at every temporary work agency in town I knew how to respond in the interview.

“I won’t do outbound sales calls.”

Recruitment agents knew that nobody wanted such work, but they had it in abundance and would often try to pitch it in a better light.

“What if it were only to existing clients?”

I always stayed firm in the beginning. (Later I would end up selling home insurance over the phone.) Until finally I received a call from a recruitment agent with an offer I couldn’t justifiably refuse, not if I ever wanted to move out of my parent’s home again.

“No it’s not sales. It’s customer service. It’s an inbound call-centre. They call you.”

So that is how it happened. That is how I became what I am. That is also how I became a part of your life too. I exist because you consume.

Who am I?

I am your customer services advisor. I am your call-op. I am in your call centres. I am legion.

Here in this vainglorious blog, all will be revealed. You will learn why we are so hatefully, wilfully incompetent. You will learn to hate us for the brats that we are. And finally, you will learn to see your own twisted reflection in the mirror of the universal call-op.

This blog is a love letter to the next caller on the line. And try to remember, like the john with his whore, you’re just one out of the eighty people I’m going to ‘help’ today.