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5- 6 years in call centres !
After leaving art college i worked in a BT call centre for 2 years did quite a lot of outbound sales calls, then i moved to an inbount customer service department. The job was absolutely shit, the pay was poor, the job was depressing and the management treated us all like children, so we started acing like children. My mates and I just took the piss, took as few calls as possible. We had several ways of doing this:
1, after the customer hangs up, immediatly hit 2nd line then dial your own (or a friend extension), on the stats it looks like your talking to someone for ages. Wer got away with this for ages as the managers just sat at thier desks watchingthe stats change, but eventually they cottened on.
2, Break your PC ( or just make it crash , which was very easy) , we werent allowed to try and fix anything, so even unplugging one we were supposed to call IT support, who took 20 mins to turn up.
3, Tell your manager that the headphones keep giving you ear infections, so you the phone rings, and you answer it..... or not..... when youve got your headphones on the call comes straight through with only a beep to warn you. we also found a way of bouncing the ringing calls arond the call centre to other phones, which was good if loads of us were up to the same scam.
We also used to work sundays which paid double time and there was only 1 manager per floor, and very few calls. We used to buy a bottle of gin and sit there drinking it from out non spill BT mugs.
The management generally were comprised of people who had started straight from school and took it very seriously, mosty of the phone monkies were graduates, a lot of the management were what we called BT robots, they would spout nonsensical rules at you, they just couldnt figiure out why we didnt like it there .
Eventually we all got laid off, and most of the jobs in Bristol (where i was living at the time ) were call centre jobs, so I (and some of my mates from BT) worked in a call center that had to pretend to be Sainsburys head office in London, check the number on the back of any of thier produce, worked there for another 2 years , kind of liked it too but was made redundant again.
Got yet another call centre job for TNT ( logistics company) which was soould destroying, long hours, repetative each call lasted on average 40 seconds and it was one after the other. The one good thing about the job was that hey gave us 2 days of bomb training, how to recognise different types of bombs and explosives, it was somthing to do with the company being able to put stuff straight onto planes with out custoims looking at the stuff.
I lasted a few months there untill i decided what to do with my life, applied to go back to uni, got 1 last call centre job untill the course started, took as may sickies as i could, i had well and truly had my fill of call centres. Maybe theyve got better, probably not. |
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