Contact centre workers

[Solongtoshort]

I have just seen a job for not much less than my salary but a good 10 hours less per week in a hosing contact centre. I am looking for a change of career, it’s Monday to Friday but l haven’t experience. One of my worries are these places are high on labour turnover and l would hate that. I need a job l can be there years with not 6 months.

Do you work in a contact centre? do you enjoy your job? Should l just apply anyway?

Everyone will have different experiences with these but generally contact centres have high turnovers of staff because put simply it’s not usually a nice environment to work in. Lots of micromanaging (“why were you out of the call queue for 3 mins”, “why did you only do 20 calls”, “why didn’t you get X sales” etc), it’s very tightly managed and I suppose in a sense it has to be because there are customers at the other end of the phone. My sister has had 2 contact centre jobs, one with the AA and one with Sky and both were essentially the same in that they had allocated lunch break times and if you were even a couple minutes late you’d be pulled, they had allocated 11 mins a day “personal time” which was to be used for toilet/filling up water bottles, if working at home where the tap/toilet is a few steps away thats not horrific but if you’re in an office where you have to walk all the way up the floor to tap/toilet and then potentially wait for others to finish you could easily see half of that gone in 1 toilet trip.

Aside from time there’s also the fact you’re having the same conversation on repeat all day every day, people can be rude or bitchy over the phone in a way they wouldn’t be to your face etc. My sister didn’t enjoy either of those jobs but some will.

One of my friends is currently working in EE contact centre and has handed in notice to leave because of micromanaging and pressure to hit unrealistic targets, team meetings EVERY morning to say you need to be hitting X sales/sign ups today, saying the reason they aren’t selling is that they aren’t trying hard enough and need to work harder, when actually the reality is cost of living means people are a lot less likely to buy or sign up to things at random… They have only been there just over 6 months and are the most experienced on their team as staff turnover is so high that they have actually been there the longest on the team at the moment.

It’s a mixed bag, typically it’s not a job many people stay in for very long it’s usually a stop gap.