Getting an earful for the council
ROSS DUTTON has heard it all during his five-year tenure as a call centre operator for Wellington City Council.
He’s fielded calls from drunk people needing taxis and people wanting weather information through to complaints about no water, noisy neighbours and stray dogs.
‘‘I’ve had someone ring and ask for the baked bean people, turns out he wanted to speak to Watties; one person asked if we did birthday parties at the landfill. Someone else rattled off about getting a ticket on a street with a very Aboriginal name –it turns out he googled it and made an international toll from his mobile to us,’’ he laughs.
On any given shift Dutton could field up to 90 calls, ranging from city housing maintenance issues to ‘‘I’ve lost my dog’’ to ‘‘someone’s parking outside’’ and ‘‘someone’s dumping human waste out on the street’’.
The strangest though is a letter the call centre recently received – and logged - from a vampire hunter.
‘‘It was about the new Transmission Gully, basically saying the land has been in the family for hundreds of years, don’t build it or you’ll unleash hell.’’
The Englishman shares another anecdote where he and his colleagues took multiple calls about the same dog that had gone wandering.
‘‘The dog had obviously gone on an adventure. It all started in the middle of the city and after about two hours he’d ventured up to Mitchell St in Brooklyn.’’
Humour aside, not every call is so lighthearted and as a result Dutton has grown a thick skin over the years.
‘‘I’ve been called every name under the sun, people have called me the C word, the F word, they’ve told me a British person shouldn’t be working at Wellington City Council – people have no filter if they’re really angry and screaming down the phone at you.
‘‘But with a job like this you can’t take it personally, you take it on the shoulder and once the call is finished you poke the co-worker next to you and have a laugh.
‘‘The team here definitely helps in keeping you sane, because it can be quite a hard job dealing with people who aren’t always the happiest people around.’’
While Dutton admits it’s sometimes hard to stay cool, his tactic is to remain quiet and let the customer vent without interrupting.
‘‘Some people, for example, get displaced by a major project in the city. There was a certain area where a supermarket was opening up and we copped some abuse from store owners even though it had nothing to do with us.
‘‘It eventually got to the point where they had a specific person to go through.’’
Every now and again Dutton might receive a call from one of those angry people apologising for their behaviour and thanking him for his help.
‘‘When someone who has abused you calls back like that it does blindside you but it also gives you a boost.’’
Dutton points out that call centre operators are far more than just receptionists, they have ample general knowledge to boot and that is frequently tapped in to.
‘‘Visitors to the city might ring up to find out if there are any major events going on or where they can get tickets to events like WOW, and we happily direct them.’’
Whatever the type of call, Dutton must take the customer’s details and log the job so it can automatically be forwarded to the right department for action, if action is needed.
‘‘Thankfully we have a customised logging system that automatically does that side of things so we don’t need to know who is going to what job off the top of our head –that is very handy because there are so many areas we can’t be expected to know absolutely everything off the bat.’’
Each call logged comes with a level of urgency, which can range anywhere from 30 minutes for a life or death situation through to three working days for an issue like an element on a stove isn’t working.
‘‘Life and death situations can relate to anything from our own council server room is overheating, which means we could lose millions of dollars if we lost all our databases through to someone’s not well or potentially dead inside their house,’’ says Dutton.
‘‘Unfortunately it does happen and it’s one of those things we can’t avoid.’’
Dutton has been on the end of a call along those lines.
‘‘The operator next to me got a call from a man logging an urgent job for his stove, apparently he was fine, maybe a little out of breath but no sign whatsoever that there was going to be anything wrong.
‘‘I later got a call from [the housing] maintenance [team] saying the contractor had been out and saw the man lying dead on the floor. It’s your worst kind of call as an operator.’’
That aside, it’s the sheer variety of the job and the fact that there’s always something new around the corner that keeps him interested.
‘‘You don’t ever know what is going to come next, it could be a real curve ball or it could be something simple that takes 30 seconds to log.’’
Dutton also gets to enjoy some time away from the phones, having been on the front counter with building consents and liquor licensing for the past two months.
Customer-facing roles are all too familiar for Dutton, who previously worked at the Ministry of Justice in court fine collections.
‘‘That’s where I built up my thick skin,’’ he says.
He recalls a death threat he and three colleagues received during his four-year stint there.
‘‘That was a bit of a rough period. I got escorted to the bus stop every day a week until it calmed down. I was always looking over my shoulder, the guy had been done for grievous bodily harm.’’
Dutton had dabbled in part-time work before that, helping to organise the children’s day campaign for Child, Youth and Family, working on web design and even creating his own record label.
‘‘That one unfortunately tanked, music piracy killed that,’’ he laughs.
Dutton had relocated from England to New Zealand with his family at the age of 14, finished his schooling here, went on to study graphic design at Natcoll Design and Technology and later focused on music at Whitireia Polytechnic.
‘‘I am a musician outside of work, I have been for 10 years now. It takes up a lot of my free time outside of work, the work pays for the hobby that I’d love to become the work,’’ he jokes.
Dutton is an electronic music producer, using synthesiser and drum machines to perform.
He’s part of the live techno/DJ duo called Duo Alias, performing at venues in Wellington and around the country, as well as on Radio Active twice weekly.
‘‘Working helps to support my outside interests, I want to work to live, not live to work.
‘‘The council is extremely supportive of people like me, and having personally suffered from depression, it’s good to have that amazing level of support behind you.
‘‘Despite the abusive calls and the curveballs that get thrown at you, in this job it really is the people, the team leaders, the supportive management, who make it a great place to work.’’