Customer Service Call Center Jobs are awesome!

[richardd]

it really depends on what you can get away with.

at boston proper, i wasnt aloud to read books/magazines or mangas. but i could play my psp, or watch movies on my ipod (with headphones off obviously) as long as i followed my script and got the orders right. i NEVER understood that lol.

if you're at a call center with proxy's on absolutely everything, than it can suck getting passed it on a daily basis. but the worst thing you can ever do it look at a clock. i would draw, or make my own little crossword puzzles with some friends to make whatever time go by faster lol.

a job is a job, you gotta pay your bills somehow

[Dmitry]

I work for a local IT company in their call center, which handles some bigger companies in our area who have global offices. It can get busy sometimes, but the big boss wanted me working 2-noon, so once all the first shift people come in I'm like one of the last people to get calls. It's probably like every other company where it depends on the people that make or break the job.

[Wintermute]

I used to work for one of the bigger gambling companies about 2 years ago.

The job was soul crushing, mindless, and tedious but not exactly "hard". Once you fall into a rhythm you can do that shit half-asleep.

Hours were shite, 90% of the customers were beyond stupid, and we spent more than half our time correcting mistakes made by our other CS location because those fuckwits were even dumber than the players.

They actually closed our offices to move it to where all the fuckwits worked and told us we could keep out jobs if we moved to Bulgaria for 1/3 of our current pay.
I can only imagine how shambolic their CS is now with no-one to fix all their mistakes for them.

Met a few cool people and a have few good stories from that place at least.

[Shibo]

I used to work at an outsourcing tech support call center. The pay was pretty good, started out at 11.50 an hour, but i was burnt out after about a year of it. Our computers weren't very good, but that was the last thing that caused me to rage at that job.

Top two:

1. Call center "team leads" and "supervisors" are the most worthless fucks that roam this planet. They don't take phone calls for months at a time and just sit at their desk with their thumbs up their assholes. (My manager was awesome though, and if it wasn't for him I would've never lasted a year)

2. Customers from clients. Apparently when you work at a tech support desk and they call you to fix their problem, you are also the source of their problems. I hope their shit never works again (which considering the incredibly low average IQ from the people calling, it won't ever work for more then a few days).

Oh and like you they wouldn't let me fix anything I could easily fix in the office building either. Had to always wait for the overpayed-underqualified IT person to come stare at it until you get impatient and fix it yourself.

end rant

edit: oh yea, and the network admin was a douche. Blocked BG after i was there after only 2 or 3 months. I was a disappoint.

[Bluefrostie]

I worked at 1-800-flowers once when I was 16. They broke the law as far as having minors work and I kept bringing it up and they said they would 'talk about it' to their bosses but they never did. They would make us work (my best friend and I worked there) until 12 AM when we had to be in school by 7:30. I worked during Valentine's Day and people kept asking me why their flowers hadn't been delivered. I told them I would come back for the next major holiday (I believe it was Easter) and I just didn't show up. They got pissed at me.

We also had to dress nicely for a job that had to take only phone calls, and I got in trouble for wearing pants that were not slacks but were not jeans. It was a weird material. They didn't use screen savers so the log in screen was burned into the monitor.

I wasn't allowed to read my textbook while I waited for phone calls. We basically just had to sit there and 'browse' the website's intranet (couldn't even go to yahoo), and this was the time before cell phones were popular. Basically a boring job, and my dad stole all the money I made, because he and I had a joint bank account that he conveniently closed and put it in his Chase account the week before I turned 18.

@Cyn, yeah 8.5 an hour. But here's the best part, I can earn 1% commission if I sell....1500$ worth of merchandise or more!

I hate commission.

I worked at the Lands' End dept. at Sears. We would make a base of $6.50 an hour, plus 3% commission on what we sold. They don't make cheap clothes, so you could easily bump your pay to $9/hr.

However, most of the time my coworkers and I passed the day talking to each other, because on slow days, we had no customers, so by law they had to bump our pay to $7.15/hr. On weekends, one of our coworkers would hog the register and easily rack up thousands in sales.

If we sold something worth $50 (that's $1.50 on commission), Sears would pay us $8.00 on our paycheck. If they returned it, they would take that $1.50 back and then put us back under the minimum wage limit. Or if we made money in sales last week that 'took' from the store because they had to bump us up to minimum wage, and we made up the difference the next week, they would subtract it from the paycheck. Commission is whack.

[Skyylya]

I work at a call center technically doing online admissions. Starting pay was 17.31/hr last year when i started and you don't even need a degree to get hired. You need to be good at phone sales but that's about it.

I've since gotten a raise and a promotion with a monthly bonus and i spend all day on the phone and doing admin stuff now. It's pretty nice. I will say though, the management atmosphere is pretty tough if you don't hit your numbers. A lot of people don't last.

[richardd]

I work at a call center technically doing online admissions. Starting pay was 17.31/hr last year when i started and you don't even need a degree to get hired. You need to be good at phone sales but that's about it.

I've since gotten a raise and a promotion with a monthly bonus and i spend all day on the phone and doing admin stuff now. It's pretty nice. I will say though, the management atmosphere is pretty tough if you don't hit your numbers. A lot of people don't last.

17.31? damn man, were you working for google? lol

[Soa]

$8.50 an hour? WTF? I could get a job with a GED for $10+/hr (starting) over a decade ago. Has the economy really gotten that bad lol?

Yeah, companies are using the economy as an excuse to pay people shit wages for pretty much every job now. My wife works at a hotel making $10/hr, and they have systematically fired all their old employees who were making $15+/hr so they can hire cheaper employees. She herself got fired from her old job at a hospital making $17/hr only to find out later they replaced her with someone making $9.

I've been trying to get fired from my call center job because I'd rather shamefully collect unemployment than work at that job, but it's almost impossible to get fired because their turn overs from people quitting is way too high.

A friend of mine is doing the same right now and they won't fire him either. They have a dress code and he shows up every day in shorts and flip flops, surfs porn all day, and is generally rude to callers and doesn't follow the script, but they won't do anything about it. He hates the job but won't quit because he can't find another job that pays more than pennies.

[Holly Short]

I'd rather do a call center than dealing with people in person, especially in fast food or retail. (Fuck Walmart, speaking from personal experience while in school)

[Guyverarmor]

I make 17.06/hr but I answer phone calls from Billing and Tech support reps. who need help, n addition to taking customer escalation calls. Even though I am making okay money, I am still trying to find another job because I am burnt out on my job -_- especially when people hired are just warm bodies... HR doesn't even try to screen the damn people they hire. It's fucking lame to be honset, then I gotta clean the agent's mess because they were either too damn lazy to do anything ( have yellwed at 3 agents so far because of this) or they are just too damn stupid and do not have common sense.

/endrant

[Ikarys]

/endrant

Hate to say it but it isn't that much different than any other customer service industry; the workers who do a half-assed job make it difficult for everyone else, and the customers who are intentionally monstrous make it tough to take the genuinely upset ones seriously.

Personally, I love my call center job, listening to a team of about 30 reps and auditing their calls for both accuracy (making sure they are adhering to federal regulations, providing factual info) and customer service (making sure they aren't trolling callers).

[LurkaKitty]

I worked at a call center for bank of america. It was really easy, never had anyone yelling at me (it`s all in the attitude you carry over the phone). But there was mandatory overtime, 60-70 hours a week, 12 hour shifts only. Working 12-12 six days a week really didn`t sit well with me, so I quit.

Some things were cool though. Like it was pretty neat going through training though, they used real customers` account info, granted what we trained on was very out of date. Kind of neat seeing what Oprah and Brett Favre spend their money on. Also it was humorous having old men and sometimes women calling demanding to know what this "EZEXTENDZ" is on their credit card bill and telling them someone used their card to purchase male enhancement products.

But like someone else said, we were also timed and monitored. You could get away with some use of the internet, to look up companies or things you didn`t recognize on bill statements.

Also since bank of america is also wachovia, suntrust, and wells fargo, but don`t want their customers to know that, we had to answer the phone with "Thank you for calling billing inquiries". We were actually told that if a customer asks what company/bank they`re speaking to, to say the name of their banking facility. If we didn`t know, we were supposed to ask them where they bank.

I did have to do this once, and it was really funny. "Billing Inquiries"
"Yes what bank am I speaking to?"
"Ah.. who do you bank with?"
"Suntrust"
"You`re speaking to a Suntrust representative"
Sounds sooo shady

[Melena]

I worked at EA from 99-02. When I worked there most people had P90mhz computers with 32-64mb ram and if lucky a hard drive with more then 250mb. If we had to test a game we had to run to one of 4 higher end P2 systems with a 3d graphics card, which meant putting the customer on hold and running to another computer for 10-20 minutes. So I feel your pain on the shitty computers for training.

[Meresgi]

Just got back from another at the fun factory training. Our fucking trainer went to show us some bullshit videos of "Oh this is how we do this type of printing!"...stuff I already know so didnt care too much and just doodled...Then she opened up a Microsoft Word document and exclaimed "Oh I thought this was a video..hmmmm I wonder why it doesn't play".

I shit you not the icon for the file was the regular MSWord icon, there was text there when she opened it...and she still looked for the fucking play button.

[Kylewhataru]

Depends on the company you're working for. I did tech support for AT&T a few years ago, pay was decent, $17/hour, but it was a nightmare. You're glued to the phone all day long, as soon as you hang up one call your phone starts ringing again, and you deal with the general public which are mostly dumbasses. People are rude and step all over you and you're supposed to just take it and not say anything.

Now I work for a small IT company, our client base is mostly small businesses, and it's much better. When people call me they know what they're talking about, they're not random dumbasses that call their DSL company (AT&T) because their computer wont turn on.

I get about 2 calls per hour, and most of the time it's pleasant, when I get people that are rude I just hang up on them, if people yell, curse, whatever, we can just end the call, if they keep at it we will just block their # and/or terminate their account. In the past 6 months I only remember one crazy fuck, dude kept screaming, I hung up on him the first time, he called in again screaming, let him know his # was being blocked and hung up on him again. On our tool that monitors incoming calls I could see the dumbfuck kept trying to call in for like an hour, the system discarded his calls of course, but he kept trying, eventually gave up.

So if you're going to do that type of work do it for small companies, it isn't really a "Call center" here, we have 3 tech support guys, 2 sales guys, couple of accountants and some managers, that's it. At AT&T it was like a farm of people, the complex had 3 buildings, each 3 stories, every floor housed at least 60 reps, you felt like a "number" working at that place, and the corporate attitude is annoying, they try to monitor how long you take breaks, how long you're in the bathroom, it was ridiculous.

[BlackOut]

In all honesty, getting paid 17 an hour for sitting down and talkin on the phone all day seems pretty good to me considering i do retail and get 9 for stock AND costumer service lol

[Meresgi]

People are rude and step all over you and you're supposed to just take it and not say anything.

This is going to get me fired I just know it. The first time some fucking assclown starts flipping out on me im going to just hangup on him or transfer him to a supervisor w/o even trying to calm him down. Not getting paid 8.50/hr to deal with that shit.

So if you're going to do that type of work do it for small companies, it isn't really a "Call center" here, we have 3 tech support guys, 2 sales guys, couple of accountants and some managers, that's it. At AT&T it was like a farm of people, the complex had 3 buildings, each 3 stories, every floor housed at least 60 reps, you felt like a "number" working at that place, and the corporate attitude is annoying, they try to monitor how long you take breaks, how long you're in the bathroom, it was ridiculous.

That's kind of interesting because this company is technically a company that deals with only small businesses. But it's part of a larger entity. Also they monitor everything we do and track everything we do. They even monitor our calls with their big brother system to make sure we arn't taking too long, but also not using up too little time. that way they can find some reason to complain no matter what.

"You took too long on that call!"
"You were too short with that call!"

[Kylewhataru]

In all honesty, getting paid 17 an hour for sitting down and talkin on the phone all day seems pretty good to me considering i do retail and get 9 for stock AND costumer service lol

Tech support jobs usually require a degree, $17/hr is not alot when you're $40k in debt from getting your degree. I've seen costco hire cashiers for $12/hr, so you bust your ass off for 5 years, get in debt, and only make $5/hr more than your average retail person.

Should be temporary though, can't expect to make $60k/year on your first few jobs after graduating, experience is what gets you the high paying jobs, definitely will not be doing this type of work forever. Even though I have it easier here I still have to much of an ego to do this kind of work, I wanna be a manager or something you know.

[Blackmagik]

I work in a call center for 3rd Party Utility Services (Water / Sewer / Trash etc..). Sometimes the residents are so fucking dumb they cant even read the damn bill thats infront of them. Although getting paid 12$/hr sitting there hearing them bitch about how much water they did or didnt use gets annoying, its better then most jobs. We get to read books when we have no emails or calls coming (which is often, considering were the biggest 3rd party billing company in the USA).

And the number of people who cant call in who try to use a computer but dont know what the fuck they are doing is pretty insane... gah stupid people -.-;

[Swarley]

People are rude and step all over you and you're supposed to just take it and not say anything.

This sums up just about every job that involves working with customers.

Honestly, I could never work that sort of thing. I'd rather get paid minimum wage and be running around trying to get everything done my entire shift, then get paid top dollar and be bored.