Unlike most people, I loved my call centre job
James Adonis found a sense of camaraderie he hadn’t felt before.
Ispent the better part of a decade in the call centre industry – and seriously loved it. There was an infectious energy, an audible buzz, a sense of camaraderie I hadn’t experienced elsewhere.
Those of us who relish it are obviously a minority. Call centres are more often denigrated and ridiculed, avoided and despised.
They’re typically seen as an opportunity for people to get their foot in the door before they start searching for another job, only this time to escape.
Their pain is completely understandable. There are constantly flashing lights alerting you to ever more calls in the queue; there are myriad KPIs and unrelenting surveillance that monitor every detail; there are rude customers and complaining customers and recorded calls scrutinised by your adolescent boss; there are robotic scripts and slow IT systems that freeze at the worst possible time.
And all your tolerance and tenacity is exercised for little more than entry-level pay. Yeah, I totally get their pain.
It’s a pain with specific consequences, some of which are highlighted in a study of more than 700 call centre operators, due to be published in the esteemed Journal of Management next month. The researchers investigated a particularly prominent feature of call centre work: customer mistreatment.
This is when employees are subjected to varying forms of abuse from their clientele.
Sometimes it’s subtle impoliteness evident in just a disrespectful tone.
Other times it’s yelling and swearing and the use of condescending, demeaning language. In any case, there’s an undeniable effect.
Or rather, effects (plural). These include diminished job performance, a deterioration in wellbeing, greater levels of emotional exhaustion, and a likelihood employees will engage in sabotage against the customer.
I’ve witnessed this from the mild end of the spectrum (such as hanging up on customers as if the line just cut out) to the extreme end (where customers’ records were modified in revenge).
Somewhere in the middle was a former employee of mine who went through a short phase of calling himself The Devil each time he answered the phone.
So what causes some of those adverse consequences, especially related to health? The scholars narrow it down to rumination.
Whenever an incident of customer mistreatment occurs, employees dwell on it for ages. This extended period of selfanalysis and criticism makes them feel worse.
Some try to remedy the situation by talking about it with co-workers, family and friends.
That approach lessens the deleterious psychological impact but it’s a double-edged sword since emotional exhaustion ramps up as well. That’s because the sharing of negative experiences can be quite draining, while talking about them means the employee is simultaneously reliving the negative experience.
For his new book, Working the Phones, Dr Jamie Woodcock from the London School of Economics went undercover as a call centre operator. He found himself making more than 300 calls a day, trying to sell insurance to people who didn’t need it.
After about six months, he was fired, which was the average rate of staff turnover anyway.
One of his major findings was the emotional conflict that arose when he and his colleagues were stuck with an angry customer. It didn’t matter how they were being treated, they were still required to ‘‘smile down the phone’’.
That incongruence between their true emotion and the one they were displaying was a primary cause of their burnout and a range of retaliatory misbehaviour.
His academic insights underscore the truths in the satirical clip titled ‘‘If Call Centre Employees Were Honest’’.
‘‘The only perk of my job is not seeing your face,’’ says one, while another admits, ‘‘I’m not sorry I placed you on hold for five minutes. I was hoping you’d hang up.’’ And more to the point: ‘‘This job has made me dead inside.’’ –Sydney Morning Herald