To Manage a Call Center Efficiently see what Employees Really Think

There are plenty of happy smiling recruitment videos for call centers on Youtube but survey the comments section below the videos and there are very few smiles. At Upscope we're researching what sort of services employees at call centers might want and to understand that we need the real unspoken truths. Youtube comments for specialist areas and niche videos contain fewer trolls and more genuine informed opinions. Below we'll list key comments made, some of the positive things people said, how management are tackling these issues in order to run their call center efficiently and what radical new ideas the future could bring.

When the president of the company does calls for a day

What did they say in the comments section?

• "I think all call center CEOs and owners need to take calls for a week just to see what their agents go through. Maybe then, they will have more empathy and improve the call center industry a bit"
• "The problem here is that he told the customer that he's the president. Don't let them know that. they will treat him differently than the do the rep. this doesn't help him get any insight when he let them know his position and that man was as calm as a cucumber compared to the rest."
• "Every call center ceo/manager should spend AT LEAST a full shift on the phone."
• (sarcastic comment) "I don't know how you do it, I'm just glad you do so I don't have to and can sit back and rack the millions while you get paid 12$ a hour to get screamed at all day."
• "He needs to learn how to say I'm sorry to the customer. Horrible customer service Mr. President"
• "It always makes me nervous when the people from headquarters comes and listens in on my calls. I know they aren't there to see if we are do everything right in a technical sense but seeing how we interact with customers but still."
• "I appreciate what you do..I don't know how you do it...!" President says it.

What can we learn from this?

1. The president turned up and struggled with even the easiest calls and he respected what the staff have to handle. It's slightly frightening that the president of the company does not know how key employees, on the front line of customer experience, feel.
2. Staff wish senior management would be more regularly involved this way so they could better understand what the job on the ground was like.
3. He used his "Presidential" credentials to make it easier on himself as people will talk to the 'President' of the company a different way. He should really have pretended to be a regular worker. The work is so tough that the president of the company went straight to his title to escape the pressure on even a low level difficulty call.

Comedy video on call center secrets

What did they say in the comments section?

• Working at a market research (surveys) call center was the most draining job I've ever had, I still remember a lady from Ghirardelli made me cry, now I refuse to buy their chocolate. :)
• "I gotta say, my issues within a call centre don't come from my customers half the time. Mostly from other departments not communicating with us. Makes it really embarassing for us to all tell the customer different information when the other departments shouldn't have their hands on my fault cases ahahha"
• They forgot some! A couple of them our team did..Selfishly enjoying the 5-10 minutes of silence when your phone didn't ring, while trying to throw your coworkers of their game until your phone rang. ?Constantly looking at the clock during calls, thinking when will it end!!
• having worked in a few call centers, to pay the bills when I've been between careers and desperate not to be homeless...I can attest to all of that.it is the most soul draining work in existence.
• the bathroom was my HAVEN! I would hide there 10 times a day!
• Damn I worked at a food delivery call center and it was a nightmare - people are always meanest when they're hungry.
• I’ve worked at many different call centers. Trust me when I say clients are the angriest when the concern has to do with their money. None of the other call centers can compare! I do not miss my call center days one bit!
• I worked in a call center 2 years, I was super nice and did everything to help unless customers had an attitude or were disrespectful. Check your attitude before you blame the call center agent. Not to say there aren't some people who don't care, but at least give them a chance.
• I always place my customer on hold for 3 mins and I just stare at the monitor.
• Working as a apple tech was awful but for the rude customers I would put on hold while I went outside to chat with co workers or grab something from the vending machine.

What can we learn from this?

1. In another article I saw a management directive not to put people on hold. Here, within the comments, you can see that putting people on hold was almost an escape. Naturally there is a conflict between people needing a break and management's view on how much of a break they need and the impact it has on the customer.
2. There were many videos in which people mentioned the bathroom as being a haven. Maybe this is true of all workplaces to some extent. It's the one place no-one can barge in really. That said, it's mentioned an unusual number of times.
3. Call center work varies by product a lot. Someone in tech support helping the elderly non-tech through their computing problems quite enjoyed spending the 30 mins or so with them. That's wildly different to hungry people or those in financial difficulties.
4. The mention of 'soul draining experience' is mentioned so often that I just started to skip it within the comments but that's probably the most common comment.

Another comedy video about call center truths

What did they say in the comments section?

• I work in a call center. 70% of my job is looking up things on Google that are accessible to the customer.
• "I'm going to pretend to be empathetic because quality insurance is listening"
  THAT IS SO ME????
• “This job has given me a fear of talking on the phones.”
• I fully intend to look you up on facebook after this just to see how much of an asshole you look are
• what annoys me most is when people interrupt me and ask questions about the thing I'm explaining
• I love to connect you over to my supervisor who will give the same information that I gave!" hahahahah this is burn!
• Working at a call center was the worst experience of my life. It was the only job I could get to help pay off my student loans. I cried daily. Thankfully I have a new job but man people can be mean.
• I've worked different CC jobs ( in Germany), some horrible, some almost ok, and I can say:Being yelled at I can cope with. I totally understand when somebody has to let off steam.Their frustration is relatable after all. 90% of the "yellers" say they don't mean to attack me personally, when they calmed down just a little (not that I would care, either).What annoys me is a rude, demanding attitude. Like demanding things that are simply not possible, and getting upset when being told that. It's like arguing with a toddler.
• What's annoying to me is the customers that call in and go on this long spiel about how long they've been holding and having to speak to other agents, all the while wasting more and more time talking about it instead of telling me what the issue is. If you want to get off the phone quicker, stop whining and get on with the issue.
• We are pretty much Paid Actors.
• i think it’s hilarious when customers say “i’m NEVER going to use your company again” and i’m like “THANK GOD!!”
• I've worked at the call centre before, CONSTANT ANXIETY AND NERVOUSNESS
• They forgot slowly turning into Hulk while someone is eating on the phone throughout the whole call.
• Please complain for 10 more minutes about how long the hold was as if you were really in a rush
• I died at “I’m going to tell you the issue is resolved so I can go on break” ??? I always get a call 5 mins before I get off and I swear that’s my go to ☠️
• For all the people commenting on how the customer care employees are ridiculous and its there jobs. I dare you to work one day at a call centre and then come back with all your lovely comments, lets see how you felt working that one day.
• "This job has made me dead inside" !!!! ACCURATE !!!!!! ??
• I worked at a call center for one summer, and it was actually the worst experience of my life. I don't have a thick skin, which probably made it about 15 times worse, but I still can't think about it without having awful flashbacks. The only positive outcome of it was that I've become so much nicer to anyone who works in any type of service industry. Its a tough job.
• You forgot: I do not know anything about this that you don't know. The only reason my position exists is so that customers have someone they can shout at and feel like the company cares about their problems.
• I used to work at a call center, and before that I worked at a dump, literally. If given the choice I would prefer to go back to the dump

What can we learn from this?

1. Yes, again, it's a job many hate. They dread it. They feel pain doing it. There is an extreme lack of positive comments.
2. The term 'anxiety' is mentioned in every comments section. Even doing live chat support involves working with difficult angry customers, let alone on phone support. In live chat support there is a bit of anxiety around opening up that enquiry in the live chat list which starts with "Why DO..." or "This tool is not workin..". At least on live chat you can use saved replies and reply after a minute. On phones it's right there and then. There's no breathing room.

Why people quit call centers

What did they say in the comments section?

• I thought I was the only one who feel this way...the anxiety, the metrics issue, feeling insufficient after training.I am happy I found your channel.
• I quit because I was getting panic attacks. After 3 months of working at the one I was at, I could not disengage from the job. It followed me home. It was in my dreams. The customers everyday were shitty. I like the point you brought up about "best reps" getting those easy calls all the time but the new people get the verbal assault squads of America calling in cursing and trying to provoke you into giving back a shit attitude. The supervisors are just like you described. Perform up to an impossible standard or be fired. Or at the very least, be stuck on the current shift you start out on forever. And at the call center I was at, the recruiters told me the job wasn't a sales job, just customer service. Total lie. You could be written up for not pitching a sales offer on EVERY CALL that came in. And even if you do that, you can still be written up because the supervisor didn't like the way you pitched the offers.
• This is so trIue because I'm currently working at a call center and feel trapped, emotionally unstable, weak, I'm driving myself crazy and I don't want to talk to anyone. I feel so alone I need help!
• Call center work is demeaning work. I can't wait for the day when machines can answer calls and save people the misery from working call centers. I worked call center work for 12 years and am so happy to be out. I now work internal tech support for a logistics company and love my job now and feel like a new man not tied to the phone. Do yourself a favor and don't work a call center job unless you have to.
• All the unattainable metrics, the 1984 system that constantly tracks your time, the ball and chain headset, and dumbass customers drove me to insanity.I eventually quit my job for a minimum wage job at a small video game store and the appreciation of not being at a call center pushed me to work hard to be promoted to a management position. I am happy with where I am now and am glad I took the plunge to jump out to something better.

What can we learn from this?

1. This guy went on one hell of a rant. He went into the dark zone with some of what he said. A few notes: Manipulated by management, told you're not quite good enough, you never feel like you'll get there, customers in the 21st century are worse than ever, more entitled than ever, metrics you can't meet, gets so bad that people get sick, paramedics there once a week, atmosphere like an asylum, people who get high on pot in their car, people with mental and emotional issues. I do recall that dentists are said to have high incidents of alcoholism because so much of their work is routine and difficult as well. The same problems likely apply to other routine and difficult jobs such as a call centers and dentists are better paid and treated with more respect by customers.
2. Metrics are mentioned often in the comments sections. Being constantly measured and evaluated by numbers must be quite exhausting. One thing we are weary of in a startup is making sure we are a team that first cares and second understands that the metrics are useful ways to measure progress. The giving a damn leads and the metrics follow, not the other way round. Managing primarily by metrics would be a sad way to build a company and work with other people.

Why I quit working at a call center

What did they say in the comments section?

• Every time I went to my call center job I was so jealous of the security guards
• I love when customers think you can work on an issue off a call. They have no idea what a call center is. Literally when you finished with one person yelling at you another is yelling instantly when the phone hangs up.
• One last thing after I was working there for year as a security guard. One of the managers asked me if I wanted to apply because they were looking for people that were fluent in Spanish. I immediately said no thank you.
• I worked in a call centre for 13 years & i assure you some time down the track you will realise that quitting that job was the best decision you ever made. Like you said i wouldn't go back for even 1 million $ a year,seriously.
• I hear ya, girl. I worked at two call centers after college and once more on a part time basis after grad school. Doesn't matter what company you work for...the work JUST SUCKS!!!! I'd rather work a couple fast food jobs at once before I take another call center job again.
• I really understand how you feel, I worked in a call center for almost 2 years as a collections agent (which to me is the worst department you can be in) me personally I'm a very shy person and I don't talk much so this job was hard for me from the beginning having to call people to ask why they haven't made their car payment and basically begging them to make a payment everyday was so depressing for me not to mention the angry customers you sometimes get on the line make it 1000 times worse, I literally use to go on break which was only 15 mins on an 8 hour shift and cry my eyes out because I hated it so much and where I live is hard to find a job so I basically felt stuck in the place also having to deal with staff who just aren't good people is the icing on the cake, I finally resigned last year in December and I remember walking out of the building and never looking back since then (I got a new job btw which I'm very happy at now) but that job gave me severe anxiety and depression so I understand how you feel.
• Ive been working for collections for a bank for almost a year and its soul crushing the management are awful. Spare yourself the stress and just do not take the offer
• I remember being such a happy person before a call center job but my job has made me absolutely careless about the customers and their issues that have become my fault suddenly. I get verbally attacked and when they ask to speak to a supervisor, my supervisor tells me to tell them that they’re on “another call” all so that they don’t have to take the abuse while they continue to make salary. I would NEVER EVER wish this on anyone. When I worked in food, they pay sucked, it got busy, but I was with other co-workers and we felt like we were all in it together. Working at a call center is like working in hell.
• Bank call centers are the worts So many fraking rules you literally cant mess up you got to be a freaking robot

A few of the positive comments

• Some of my best experiences in working at any job was actually at call centers. I met some of the coolest people i know through them. Bank call centers are strict and depressing, i avoid those. The call center job that i had was for tech support. We helped old people find the power button on the computer, etc. It was so relaxed. Sometimes it would be back to back then other times there would be 5 - 15 min between each call, so i had plenty of time to talk with the people around me. They also let you choose your own schedules after training. the call centers you
• started with inbound Tech Support for AppleCare. It was tough because the average handling time was supposed to be around 15 minutes per call. After about a year and a half I was offered a transfer to sales for the Apple online store team. Where I found my niche. Where they want you to stay with the customer as long as possible.
• If you have patience and genuinely like people it’s not that bad. You’re safe clean and comfortable. I could think of so many worst jobs.
• I worked at a call center for 6 months for Medicaid and I’ve got to say the only thing I hated was waking up in the morning and sitting all day my butt would get SO sore it’s crazy lol since I’m a night owl. The people were 99% nice and calm because they were receiving free benefits. It was rare to get a mean person honestly, it’s not mentally straining the actual calls just the early long hours but it’s good money and no social interaction. It all depends on what call center.
• In third world country with socialism a head call centers are well paid compared with the average salaries that’s why people decide to work there. On those places a call center is high class and everyone is looking for an opportunity one time in they don’t know what is coming.

What can we learn from this?

1. The comments about being jealous of the security guard hits home. You walk by the person whose job you wish you had while going to hell. It's normally a job you might find boring. The security guards themselves seem to know that their job is a far better option than being inside on the phone.
2. The comment about working in fast food is illuminating. There is a greater feeling of a team and togetherness working in fast food than in call centers. When you're going through something tough it's nice to be there together as a team working through it. Does that feeling not existing within call centers? What's missing?

Customer support working from home

What did they say in the comments section?

• See Customer Service Reps are better off working from home, that way they aren't all grouped together like cattle.
• I like how they switched you from calls to chat. I would love to do chat majority of a shift compared to calls.
• I've been working from home almost a year now, and im feeling it really hard to stay sane. Just the thought of my next shift gives me anxiety. And I work your same shift . the job pays really well the tasks are not hard. But I dont know how much longer I can do this.
• I’ve Been working from home for 4 years now now and it’s lovely ☺️! Pays better than physical jobs, no commute to or from work, can use my own bathroom instead of a stall, so many benefits! Don’t forget to check for Windows updates every Tuesday ?.
• I just started and I been working for a few days. It’s weird repeating the same thing for hours but it’s easy but it’s not lol.

What can we learn from this?

1. It's likely the subject of the video was such a happy good person that the comments below were also a little more positive. The previous videos were a little more sarcastic and brutal. However,
2. People prefer live chat to phone calls. I imagine this is a universal truth. Phone calls are hard. Live chat gives you more breathing room.
3. Working from home can still be tough but there are many benefits.
4. The job is still not easy but the shift is a little more towards the positive overall.

What's good about working in a call center?

I have not added any comments from the video but I made a note of the top 10 or so items mentioned.

Note the pattern.

• Good salary
• Bonuses
• Attendance bonus
• Living allowance
• Night differential
• Health insurance
• Life or death insurance
• Vacation or sick leave
• Salary increase
• Referral bonus

In countries like India and the Philippines you get graduates competing for what would be well paying call center roles.

The top 10 advantages are almost all about salary, bonuses and insurance. The priorities are quite clear :)

I could not imagine working in a call center answering calls for 8 to 10 hours a day.

I still do the equivalent of an hour of customer support on live chat each day and even that can be stressful.

8+ hours a day on calls sounds like a nightmare. However, I know how much further that salary goes in countries like India. In fact, it would be seen as a good job and getting that pay check might well be worth a great deal of antagonism.

The people running those call centers are creating jobs. That's a great thing. Anything they can do to make it more human, where people work as a team together, learn together and see a good future coming their way is also the right thing to do.

Below we'll see the management perspective.

How managers handle these issues so they can run the call center efficiently

I'll take some of the people related methods from the following article and post them below:

1. "Successories motivational posters were part of a study at a call center, and they found office art and motivational posters increase productivity by 33% compared to barren offices."
2. "Additionally, call centers can simply increase productivity with small investments in recognition & reward items. According to Gallop, 69% of employees would work harder if they were better recognized. And our studies have shown that constant recognition reinforced with small, cost-effective gifts can increase productivity by 20%. Simply institute daily and weekly goals to reward employees with small items such as lapel pins or fidget toys for hitting or exceeding those goals. Unfortunately, the general mentality is that a paycheck is not a reward, it is expected for simply showing up. However, positive reinforcement and reward-based behavior gets the most out of employees while they are there.."
3. Reduce Turnover – Keeping a stable team will help you to reduce training costs and time. It will also help you to monitor productivity on a longer-term scale. Do your best to: Monitor and generate engagement; check in often. Make onboarding & ongoing coaching as stellar as possible. Encourage honest and open communication. Strive for ongoing learning, skill building, and development. Discover and provide purpose/meaning … set quarterly goals outside of day-to-day responsibilities.
4. Optimize individual efficiency – Ensure there is enough ‘refresh time’ to have people running 100% when on the queue. Burnt-out staff produce less.
5. Have the best technology – Finicky technology that makes day-to-day functions difficult, adds to the frustration and takes up far more time and man-power than most realize. No sacred cows … watch out for any processes that are time vampires.
6. Implement continuous training. Most centers do front-end training and that’s pretty much it. They don’t do anything else except maybe monitor a few calls and give some feedback.
7. Motivation is the key to success in any contact center: Every agent is different when it comes to motivation. However, it is up to the executives and floor team to find out where the happy medium is with everyone. Also, it is understood that a customer service team and a sales team would need different types of motivation techniques. This is the main key to keeping agents happy and productive. Happy agents equal better productivity and better quality.
8. Hire the right agents to fit your company culture and pace of your call activity. Use agent profiles and pre-screen your candidates with vigor. If your agent is coming from a low call volume center, likes the lull between calls, and does not have the mind-set of a face paced, efficiently routed center they will fail.
9. Create a shared agent environment where calls are routed by agent skill set. The use of skills-based routing within your ACD can drastically help to positively impact overall ASA and reduce agent handle time. This combination is very powerful once you factor in call type and duration routing within your skillset.
10. Reward your Agents with Incentives when they hit your performance metrics.
11. Continuous Improvement Training as your agents progress through your established skillsets. By establishing a continuous training schedule, you can be that each agent will receive the appropriate training to handle assigned call types. This allows agents to feel confident in the skills that they obtained for the assigned level.
12. Feedback loops are imperative to success. We tend to focus on scheduled agent feedback meetings and use Inter-Agent Chat to allow agents to share common issues and get answers.
13. One word…. HIRING. Hiring the right people, with the right attitude, outlook, and demeanor will always have the biggest impact on how efficient your contact center can be. If you have the right people on the team, you can easily implement processes (many of which will come directly from the people you hired) and have employees that enjoy their work.
14. Introduce. Quality call monitoring is one such observation that has not solely helped management in understanding clients’ demand; however, it has been the key to success towards better customer service and decreasing operational value. With call monitoring, managers have the ability to obtain insights from the continued call and get reassurance that the expected principles are met. Further, the insights are often used for analyzing continued trends within the market and those related to areas for improvement.
15. Guided Troubleshooting technologies. The number one challenge most contact centers face is the cost of agent training. Because of the pressures associated with most industries, high turnovers are unavoidable and training sessions need to be conducted frequently with new agents. An average turnover rate in customer contact centers is 30-45%, while in other industries it’s approximately 15.1%. In such an environment, training is time-consuming and expensive. According to the Deloitte survey, it takes about $12k to replace an average call center agent.
16. Increasing context. When a contact center agent answers a person, he usually needs to start collecting information or authenticating the identity of the caller. This can happen more than once when a person gets transferred between agents.
17. To stop focusing agents on efficiency, even if that is counterintuitive. Have agents focus instead on fully resolving customers’ needs on the first contact whenever possible and preventing repeat contacts. One contact center stopped sharing average handle time statistics with agents and focused agents on first contact resolution metrics instead.
18. Isolating the most important behaviors at the agent and team level reinforcing them consistently thorough training, recognition, calibration, and call coaching.

The "Call Centre Helper" list on how to keep staff motivated

I'll do a brief summary of the top 10 or so key points from their article.

1. Happy workforce. Keep employees happy by providing what they need in terms of training (soft skills as well as technical knowledge) and genuine support with positive messages where appropriate and constructive feedback where development is needed. This will motivate the team to work better.
2. Senior manager feedback e.g. congratulating a team member on doing well.
3. A positive attitude.
4. Right tools and skills for the job.
5. Focus on motivating the best staff and not carrying others.
6. Keep things fresh by changing incentives, awards, motivational games.
7. Use training to keep people up to date and focused.
8. Offer a nice clean working environment.
9. Rewards and praise for doing well.
10. Show career progression opportunities.

Reading through a number of other articles you'll see a pattern. Everyone mentions the same sort of things. So, why is staff turnover still averaging 40%?

A blunt analysis of the underlying problem

There's been an incredible amount of work put into efficiently running call centers but the staff turnover still remains incredibly high.

The average turnover rate for a call center is 30% to 40%.

The turnover rate is incredibly high. The comments on Youtube are almost universally negative and even though Youtube comments are not normally the best guide, we're talking about comments from active staff under niche videos and not the mainstream vids attracting the trolls. Many of the comments were detailed and specific and told the same story.

Occams razor: The job generally sucks

Given the evidence we can conclude that it just sucks.

It's hard. People are angry and even if someone is nice to you, you'll dread the next angry customer that is likely to follow.

It's draining. I've answered 1,000s of live chat support requests, let alone phone support, and as a co-founder working across every part of the business I can say that support is the only one I don't look forward to. It's the most draining because it's a distillation of the hardest problems and angriest customers. I would dread to be on the phone 8 hours a day with upset customers.

Even happy customers who are positive can be a stress factor because then you worry they might run into a problem later but this might a co-founder psychological issue more than anything.

Very few people grow up dreaming to work in a call center.

Yes, there are graduates competing for the salary in countries like India and the Philippines and yet many of the comments in the Youtube video are from people working in those call centers.

How do you wish it worked?

While reading through all these youtube comments I thought through the practical problem and a possible solution.

If I had to build a call center and work in it, how would I get the job done and yet enjoy at least some of it?

Radical idea 1: Encourage turnover

The underlying problems have not been solved so that would mean either

A. The current solutions are not working.

AND / OR

B. Having a 40% turnover is something they accept as normal.

If current solutions are not working and 40% is something they don't want to accept then the solutions to the underlying problems would be fairly radical.

Here's a weirdly relevant conversation from the TV programme The Wire.

Carver: You can't even think of calling this shit a war.

Herc: Why not?

Carver: Wars end.

The idea of going to work on a Monday in a job I dread and not seeing an end in sight for years to come, only briefly interrupted by the occasional reward, bonus or promotion, just sucks.

So many complaints from the comments are about the routine nature of it, the difficulty in spending all day doing call after call with potentially very difficult customers and also being pressured by management to meet metrics.

And yet the job needs to be done.

Here's the radical idea:

1. Reframe and rebuild the job into a university degree with a graduation date.
2. Halve the time spent on calls, make the other half about learning.
3. Staff spend that other half of the day learning about e.g. technology underpinning a product, entrepreneurship, sales, marketing and consequently WHY customer service matters.
4. Expect staff to graduate and go on and do other jobs. Encourage it. Personally I'd make the degree about entrepreneurship and expect them to go build things or work for those who are building things. They should graduate with a great set of practical customer facing skills those other companies can use.
5. When they graduate, they move on. Commit to a hard stop. They can do the equivalent of a masters course or a phd if they wish but the graduation date has to be set with an expectation of leaving.

The first argument against this would likely be that the economics don't add up.

Probably true in the short run but there are both service and brand advantages to doing this.

What are the economics of a bad customer experience?

It's an age where both good and bad customer experience stories spread like fire on social media and comparison sites listing 10 competitors and customers choosing between them based on their expected experience and what the company represents.

This means there are brand advantages to this. A company that is known for deeply caring for employees in a way the new generation expects? A company that invests in staff training as well as their future? Whoever leads on radical initiatives takes the early prizes.

Radical idea 2: The creator economy changes everything

This is so radical it does not even exist... yet.

If you can be trained to do it, so can a robot. This is a comment made Naval Ravikant, the founder of Angel List. The future is creative and you can now see millions of people with their own creative niches, selling items on Etsy, creating art and music on Patreon, writing on Substack, building views and earning ad money on Youtube.

What if call centers had those creative people working there building support experiences, onboarding experiences, problem fixing experiences that they owned and they got paid for?

You can create your own Loom video to guide someone. You can create a youtube video to explain a product. Why not an onboarding flow? Why not your own custom solution to a problem that adds personality and humanity to the support experience?

The problem is that tools are not out there yet but they're coming.

At Upscope we started with Co-browsing and we're looking at the creative future that support people, like us, would really want.