Things To Be Acquainted In Contact Centers

Qolfera | Published On: March 17, 2018

Does anyone get rich, in financial side, for working in a contact center? Will everybody become a CEO for working hard with all kinds of definitions for being so good in this craft? The only assurance I personally know for working on this field, if there is no other avenue that you can decently work, to spend most of your time for earning money, working in a contact center is not a bad choice. All are welcome to apply in contact center that caters international clients or brands, undergrads, with different nationality, and even those people with physical disabilities.
"Bots Are All About Bots And More Bots" | Here

United States of America and countries in United Kingdom, are still the top continent for global contact center provider, as of 2016, want to see more those on the rankings? Here

FYI: subsets of the general outsourcing industry include business process outsourcing (BPO), information technology outsourcing (ITO), knowledge process outsourcing (KPO), legal process outsourcing (LPO), and recruitment process outsourcing (RPO).

This article's mission is to provide you an enlightenment for the people behind all those headset and computer monitor, how things really work against all the odds.

Contact center do have, (1) the in-house type which operated by the company itself meaning, call center agents are directly working for the company, considered most of the employees having more leave benefits, perks, and higher amount of salary, allowances, and incentives, in comparison (2) to business process outsourcing (BPO) type, or also termed as the 'vendor company', which run by another company or an agency, that handling different accounts or brands to served as a call center resolution provider.

1) Tasks: as it depend on the signed job contract, it can be varied from handling inbound and outbound calls, chat, email messaging, managing complaints, technical support roles, customer retention, and ticketing for dispatching field visits; more on work collaboratively with the team and manager. Employer always encourages its employee to be flexible on its definition of agents' responsibilities as they thoroughly screened those qualified thru sets of exams and interviews.

2) Metrics: there are 16-known listed here in case you need the details, though to highlight some, which always caused a havoc not only on the phone operators also to the calling customer: are the call handling time, quality of each call, and quantity of call per hour. For instance in AT&T contact center, a customer calling the phone agent , should only limit the call for 12 mins or less and multiply it on 7.5 hours of duty a day; or in JP Morgan Chase the person applying for an inbound representative, customer support role, atleast to have 80-calls per day. We have not yet covered the quality of call and the issue that the customer is calling about. There are a lot of difficult callers expected than not, who would like calling a company for issues on the service/s it provide? These are the common denominator in contact centers, special cases to those are racist customers, callers who doesn't have anyone to talk in the household call can last for min of an hour, and those for looking an adult good-time, weird isn't it?

3) Micromanagement: an 'irritant' most often than not, weaklings will be most highlighted during sessions of group meetings, or the person with low and slow pacing qualities have more chances to be expel from the program leading to not illegible for re-hire, with a 6-months of evaluation period. Its individual impact is detrimental, giving you an option for self-deprecation, colloquially a taboo. There are vendors that are really strict on this rule as it coincide with the site performance goal or else the brand will seek another vendor that can give or boost their annual sales growth.

4) Health: its hazardous in a sense, if an employee has no sense of self responsibility in managing the so-called his or her health - physically, psychologically, and spiritually. Some of our colleague, phone agents, are in danger of cardiovascular type of diseases and mental illnesses due to the impact of stressors, not mainly on the type of its environment, most were lifestyle-work related. Had you seen someone already lack or short of sleep, intoxicating with cigarettes and alcohol during breaks and after work shift , high in sodium-fatty-greasy and high-carbs diet, low or less in fiber containing foods. Did you or are you experiencing disturbances in body-clock/rhythm and bad eating habits and mal-patterned meals?

Partners' whom cheat are ordinarily accepted in call center environment, another form of taboo; irregardless of the persons' position or where department or account he/she belongs to.

 For the general sense of this article we performed data mining and we've found this story: "Watchdog: AT&T employee tells why reps fail customers" - Dallas News

5) Benefits: it includes most often medical insurance and coverage, paid-leave allowances, salary bonuses, money or performance incentives, deductible taxes' this can vary if your single or married employee; these so-called employment insurance are always dependent on the type of company whether its a small or a large scale in-house or just one of its/the vendor. Its not uniformed across verticals, which are the usual things that an employee tend to bargain in the entire duration of work hence not addressed, employee will leave and find another employer that have higher good benefits; and this how the attrition rate, also termed as churn or staff turnover rate, introduced on the background of a typical issue on whatever company it is, its perceived negative because its not cost effective on the business side. Will you employ a staff investing your capital on it, knowing that employee can only last less 6-months or less on the project?

Contact centers' agent base of annual salary, for example in the US is $30,750.00, while in developing countries, for instance in Philippines, its inexperienced phone agent's annual salary can start from $4,330.00, allowances and other benefits already included. In considering with the workload who do you think works worst? Please excuse with my words, I am aware that negative words is in-no use in call center operations. Its a NO NO.

Bilingual phone agents, and agents with financial account background tend to receive higher salary compare to those only in front desk type of role, and the techy one.

6) Prejudices: common misconception for working on this form of industry is a low skilled type of people employed; being a super agent, in only one call, which handles all kind of tasks from customer service front desk type role becoming into technical role to financial or billing concerns up to managing the customers' complaint for poor service quality; perplexing work schedules name it the type of occasions, holidays' that present in your calendar you are not excuse - not to report on your assigned job - even natural maladies or a disaster are on the road - an employer need a legit paper for you to be excused. Maneuvering the said documents can lead to expulsion.

 There are phone representatives stacked for 5- or 10- years, the one I spoke she has been on for 20-years on the billing side, she quit after feeling burn-out, and yet no changed happen when she is one of the calling customer for poor service quality issue of the provider, the company she use to work before.

 You can find tons of grammar-police wannabe in contact centers, particular in word diction and sound intonations; offensive in a sense that the environment is in a diversified culture. Why imposed such a sea level intelligence?

Another taboo: there is (are) established vendor/s, renowned in BPO industry, would forced its employee to extend its hours of phone call duties even on periods of rest-days: fail to do as per against the signed job contract - there would have a form of sanctions either a memo or suspension. Do you think the governing bodies or its principal contact center companies tolerating this with their vendors? - another contributing factor impacting the churn rate, why not addressed it then?

7) Queuing: this is old, obsolete term in call center environment; this can become the worst enemy of the phone operator if people on the said country are experiencing severe poor quality of service - basically these are due to the uncontrollable forces of the mother nature, though in some instances it can be man-made like cyber-attack on the system enough to cause the shut down of operation in contact centers , black or power outages on customer's area, and last customers' panic.

8) Artificial Intelligence: most of the contact center, in the special case of those in the vendor side, not aware that these AI's are integrated, common perceived conceptions is just a computer, internet, and a headset; wherein its not. Your are the most queuing agent on the phone but your other colleagues is just about to sleep? Each call is calibrated by these AIs' abilities, harnessing the solutions for instance of Verint, Avaya, CCMS, Plantronics, RSA security tokens.

We made a short article, titled: "Unhappy Rogue Twitter Bots," related to bots and what does it do? Had you encountered a phone operator, answered your call in a 'robotic' manner, software companies; like Ameyo or Blue Prism; are doing all their best to make these 'bots' sound natural - there is so called speech synthesis try to listen to this sample audio (1 & 2) if you can identify if its a real person or not.

 The reason behind all these AIs: adoptive to 'Machine Learning,' technologies is to cut-cost, in a short sense without going around the bush, its to increase the earning of the company. Is this a win-win situation? There is a bot technology called "Robotic Process Automation," (RPA) which can work the workload in total of five-humans without any traced of error - according to Harvard Business Review (here) this will not cause a lay-off instead it is believed to cause a need for more human jobs? Wavenet is so called Google's Assistant, which it has more natural intonation and diction of its voice.

There are a lot of stuffs going on behind the screen when talking about branches of AIs' such as the machine learning and cognitive intelligence of these robots, not only on the operations of contact centers though in all kinds internet based of business solutions, on eCommerce, health: science & technology, government day to day activities, so on and so forth, in elimination of human errors: corruption.

This article is not meant to be precised nor a basis for professional help instead to educate wanderers', you may have an acquiescence or bargains email me at qolfera@gmail.com.


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