Call centres and how to survive them.

I’ve worked in call-centres for a couple of well established companies over a number of years and I’ve dealt with a significant number of callers and been trained in various means of ‘call handling‘. If anything what surprises me about the quality of the information that is generally offered in the media about call centres is how one-sided it is in relation to the nature of what is desirable to get from a call: without considering how call centres are organised these press-articles are not necessarily going to be of any benefit to the reader. To understand how to deal with call centres you need to understand how the call centre is run and the objectives that the management have - unless you understand this then you are likely to be kept hanging on…..

There are some key issues that need to be addressed in order to deal with the ‘call centre hell’ without being too frustrated by the experience. Largely many of the problems that customers experience are due to the fact that costs can be cut when offering a service that will help one company become more competitive than others in the same market and one means of doing this is by paying staff a low rate of pay. Consequently there can be little incentive to stay within a company’s call centre and the staff turnover tends to be high. High staff turnover tends to be a major issue in call centres and it is largely because of the highly target oriented environment that can lead to very low levels of job satisfaction due to the pressured environment. As a result of high staff turn over, staff then will tend only to be trained on specific issue-areas and can only deal with a narrow range of issues - increased competitiveness – or savings for the company leads to staffing that is less able to deal with the overall business of a company. For a national newspaper to aim to offer systems of ‘getting through to a person as soon as possible’ is a little misleading as the person that you get through to may not be able to assist with your enquiry, for instance, it may get you through to a team leader or floor manager who can not deal with your enquiry who then only has to transfer you to another queue.

One of the most ridiculous areas for the mass media to criticise call centre staff on is the way that call centre staff ‘interrupt’. Most call centres that are ‘outsourced’ that are staffed by personnel that are not employed directly by the company whose enquiries they are dealing with are subject to contract review and they may lose a contract if they are not dealing with calls in a manner that the client company desires. Consequently, there can be a strong regime of call management that demands calls are generally dealt with in a structured manner making a key issue for anyone in the call centre who wishes to keep their jobs - they deal with calls in a structured and systematic manner to the satisfaction of the client. If this also involves keeping calls short then it is inevitable that calls will involve interruptions. To consider staff as being rude who are aiming largely at keeping their jobs when they are instructed to deal with a call structure and time limits that demand that interruptions are used is senseless. Call-centre staff could well be Britain’s factory workforce with low-autonomy jobs - they have little interest in interrupting or being party to a rudeness in a call and may prefer the open discussion.

I’ll offer some advice on how to deal with call centres as I see as appropriate – I hope it is of some use to the reader. I should also state what I mean by call centre. I am referring to an office or section that deals almost entirely with telephone calls incoming and outgoing ensuring other staff are free of interruptions. This can include 'outsourced' call centres which are located outside of the mother organisation and based often in another country.

Menu systems - if you feel that the menu systems are totally unsuitable for the enquiry and don’t get you through to anyone quick enough then you need to state this briefly. If the call-centre is low budget they will have staff trained on a narrow range of issues consequently consider using a different company if the one that you go are using don’t administer things in a way that suits you - if enough people complain then menu systems may be changed. Quite often, especially for small organisations, it is possible to get straight through to the reception by pressing zero: '0'. This may also throw you out of the system as well.

Allow enough time - call centres tend to be managed on the basis that there will be peak times and low demand times that will leave the call centre with nothing to do. They aim to have enough staff available for different scenarios and they are not perfect in their predictions.

Ask when the low demand periods are - ask what the call forecasts are like for early in the morning and late in the day before the call centre closes. If there are periods when there are lower levels of calls to deal with then it may be better to call at these times.

Have an interruptable task to do while you are waiting in the call queue - drink tea, do the crossword, write a shopping list or list of things you’ll need to do, or anything that may be stopped while you are waiting. I generally won’t call an 0870 number without something to do whilst I am on hold waiting for someone to answer. Even if you are calling at a low demand period there could be a sudden unpredicted influx of calls owing to an unforeseen event and this could be a reason that you hang on without knowing why. Be relaxed and be ready not to get through immediately, this rarely happens. Don’t get left feeling that you’re hanging on….

Have all supporting information relating to the call with you - most people would prefer to call a call centre again having made a booking or made an order than to read the paperwork that they have been sent. Consequently, more calls are made to the call centre than is necessary and the impact that this makes is to increase call volume and then reduce the chances of someone else getting through. The time taken to get through to some call centres at peak periods tends to be less than the time it would take to read the information that has been sent that could answer your enquiry - it makes sense to look through what you’ve been sent, especially if you are holding on waiting to speak to a member of staff. If you think the information is unclear inform the company that you think it’s badly written and why. Consider if it could be in clearer English and if so ask them if they have would consider a link with ‘the Plain English Society’.

Take the name, extension number or team details of the call centre agent - without this most information from the call can not be checked at a later date. Frequently, this is the most significant information to have on a call and is often more important than any other information. If you hear information stating all calls are recorded then it is likely that this is going to be to your advantage - only if you have made a note of who you spoke to. Someone may refuse to give their name, frequently staff will be informed that they are not expected to give their surname when asked. In this case ask for an extension number - for an agent not to give their name and extension number or name and team so they can be easily identified should be classed as highly unprofessional. If a person slurs their name or refuses to give it call back immediately to make a complaint as the information that you’ve been given doesn’t really have much validity unless you can link it to a member of staff. Most call centre staff should state their name at the start of the call - if they don’t it’s generally unprofessional not to do this.

Take the time of the call - any tracing of calls that are made where there is a dispute over the information that has been stated will usually require at least a rough time of the time a call was made within five or ten minutes. Calls are logged in a computer system usually under the extension number of the agent who made the call and the time it was recorded. If an average call centre agent deals with eighty calls per day and there are thirty staff then that is two thousand four hundred calls per day. Obviously, if staff are willing to take your side over being misinformed, and it will happen if there are that many calls being dealt with, then they will want to trace a call as soon as possible - it is imperative to have a record of the time of a call if you want to use the digital record of it to your advantage.

Deal with interruptions - if you feel that you are being led along certain routes that you don’t want to go down then state clearly and categorically the reason that you called and emphasise that you don’t wish for any other services to be offered. State that you wish to control the call and that you only want to ask a few things. The staff should be able to co-operate with you.

Privatisation - are there other methods of offering competitive public services?

Following on the blog late last week regarding the misinterpretation of what privatisation was about in terms of how it relates to socialism, the removal of Clause VI from the Labour party and other action that I think has led to a restriction on socialism in the west, it does cross my mind why Clause VI was removed when adapting it grossly and fundamentally may have been adequately for the Labour party. I don’t doubt that it could well have been a very strategic move which was aimed at promoting the fact that the Labour party were really ‘listening to the public’ and were moving on from all that was wrong with socialism, at least in terms of how Murdoch saw it. Whether or not this move has become seen for what it is does highlight how blinkered the media can be about this type of thing.

The dropping of clause VI was no doubt a significant milestone in terms of the operation of the Labour party to pander to the whims of the media who are dominated by private sector interests. I do feel the need to express some dissatisfaction that greater awareness of the flexibility of public services wasn’t explored. During the eighties there was a general ‘restructuring’ or reorganisation of the economy, not that it’s possible to stop this from taking place at any point anyway. There was the transition from what’s been called the 'Fordist' to 'post-Fordist' economy - that there was an era of mass-production in nationalised industries that were inflexible, produced masses of the same goods without any ease to vary what they produced through to an economy of nice, clean, environmentally friendly, small companies which were able to offer choice to the consumer because they’d eroded workers rights with the assistance of Baroness Thatcher. Hurrah..! erm I think not some how. The ‘Fordist’ as a means of economic production was a cheap, mass produced good linked to Henry Ford and the changes that have taken place in the economy since then have involved increasing the degree of flexibility. How much of this is really due to advances in technology and is really nothing to do with neo-liberalism or any Conservative politician.

Blair's milestone was not what it may seem to be - it was about the irradication of socialism from the Labour Party not about the modernisation of the party. A Labour party would have sought to modernise the way we understand nationalisation and not let everything fall into the hands of the private sector away from appropriate influence of the workforce. Have journalists allowed this to take place and not adhered to convention - are they, including the BBC staff, just the puppets of the private sector who have facilitated the process of nationalisation over Europe? I would hazard a guess that there have been several attempts to get adequate coverage of this type of issue – have journalists been restricted for doing this?

Delivery of nationalised services could have been revised fundamentally without taking Clause VI out of the Labour Party manifesto altogether – whether there was a strong enough attempt to request revision of the services that were available in a manner that was classed as flexible to meet the needs of the times, not the job-for-life-socialism that was probably necessary considering how badly the workforce were treated in many respects, will remain open to question. Maybe with the issues relating to the fuel pricing, particularly in relation to gas at present, and water-supply company problems that take place I do wonder if there could be again, delivery of nationalised services in a form that suits the times, as can be achieved with some pushing a shoving as we’ve seen in the NHS.

The sucess of privatisation - were improvements in telecommunications due to advances in technology not privatisation?

Of all the most positive impacts that Thacherism made there was a feeling that there was going to be a major series of improvements to standards of living because the free market coming into it's own and liberating us from our old left ways.

The winter of discontent was all about the dead being 'left unburied' and society falling apart because of evil, selfish socialism. There were great assumptions that were made about the significance of privatisation and how significant the improvements were and to a large extent I wonder if journalism has failed the nation (or is it run by the same collective or nazi's who want all public resources privatised) I really can’t say. I think there was a need for change as most left-wingers around in the 1970’s would have agreed but it’s been change that has privileged a few with some signs of evidence of this, such as British Gas share dividends and increases in the value of the shares, rather than the many who may have been genuinely unaware of what a good deal nationalised distribution of domestic fuel could be.

The issue of how important the impact made by the ‘successful’ privatisation of the telecommunications industry was for the UK can not be understated. It did to a large extent shape the expectations of the public who may not have been majorly concerned or interested in private ownership of their already owned resources – is this completely my imagination or was this a well conceived plot to dupe the British nation into believing that privatisation was going to be a major benefit to the British public?

It’s interesting to explore the multiple impacts of privatisation – but perhaps, on another day.

Marxism - will it connect to neo-liberalism?

Having read around the subject of Marxism and seem its' various impacts on an extremely wide range of academic thinking and made attempts to link into related fields of practice through, for example, the SWP it is an area of political thinking that I’ve found to be much of a cornerstone of academia and political life together. The few SWP meetings I attended had only a minute element in the air of religious fervour and while this was almost negligible it did feel real, in the sense that one may sense a degree of atmosphere within a church or during important ceremony. Will the construct of Marxism that remains in society ever be revisited to the same degree as it was during the course of the 20th Century? It does seem unlikely that there will ever be the same degree of social relevance of the construct as there was in Russia and Eastern Europe in the first half of the century and likening Marxism as a doctrine to a religious movement is something I do inadvertantly. This is not intended to be derogatory - while elements of Marxist thinking may have been concerned with freedom from manipulation and a process of liberating the labour force this may no longer be a central element. If it were, surely greater attention would be paid to making activism effective?

Contemporary marxists tends to be concerned with the examination of the social and economic conditions of the time and not the formation of regimes that has taken place over a period of centuries. This may have been an element of the marxism that led to revolutions and could well provide some relevance to the action of Marxist who have such strong commitment to their principles. This will not happen during our lifetimes as far as I can see although there may be more peaceful revolutions planned in the future which appeal to the masses.

It is with some concern that I have to highlight issues connected to Third Way Politics (eg. Giddens, 1998) and it is this that causes some concern as there doesn’t seem to be what I class as a natural transition from the left to the neo-liberalism of present day Britain. Would a revised form of Marxist Communism resurrect the potential of socialism above the nonsense of 'Third Way' Politics? The third way thinkers could pay closer attention to the notion of neo-liberalism as a framework, rather than the notion of neo-liberalism as a right wing concept. For instance, if there were intent for workers to control an organisation in which they work this may be dealt with within a contemporary agenda through rotating management cycles, through sole ownership of the company on the part of an individual or the collective developing through solely worker owned shares.

This could amount to a form of Marxism, bordering on communism, in neo-liberal clothing that is dressed in neo-liberal language. However, with the emphasis on diversity that there is within the economy which may be supported quite readily by the major political parties at present, this potential tends not to be taken advantage of by Marxist bodies and it seems quite abhorrent to try to expand this agenda. It’s interesting that this element of neo-liberalism which I think gets discussed occasionally has never found a stable set of principles academically or political to be recognised but is discussed outside of such forums.

Urban Policy - The last 30 years.

After beginning the process of scanning in all of my academic articles in a PDF format - how illegal this is I can't say - I find that it very reassuring using my PC for what it's probably best for. PCs are really a major asset if used for storing vast quantities of information in electronic format - paper articles can take up a large amount of space and on CD virtually no space at all.

After finding the articles I had rather unfathomable about ten years ago I now find them rather easy to get through despite not having the depth of knowledge in economics which I think is necessary to really get to grips with the area. Will I find the articles of any significant use after the Kings Norton New Deal for Communities experience? May I be able to add any advantage to the experience of the New Deal for Communities staff or residents through summaries of the reviews of information? The regular comment from the residents who were on one hand disaffected and disengaged was they had '...heard it all before...'. On the other hand there were some slightly different elements to the programme in terms of the approach and the content of some of the projects that were likely to add a slightly different flavour to the attempts at tackling multiple deprivation. I don't know if the small and appropriate differences in planning and delivery would actually constitute a new paradigm in urban policy as some may claim, there is also the question of whether there have been significant shifts at all in delivery - is urban policy being delivered in a significantly different manner than was actioned under conservative governments of the 1990s?

Urban regeneration is a very complex process involving a number of professional disciplines as social action can be viewed from a great many perspectives in terms of it's suitability and effectiveness. On reflection, urban policy has a heritage as old as cities themselves. To a very large extent it is necessary because cities are geographical forms which exist because of the control of capitalism by an elite has shaped the population that lives in a defined area. Capitalism has functioned through highly controlled rather than free markets and peasants may have migrated towards cities centuries ago because they were offered better living conditions prior to adequate induction into the areas that they moved. Is the longer term history of an area that significant a factor when looking to influence the manner in which urban policy is delivered? It would be interesting to examine what improvements in delivery this would lead to and what problems this would cause if historic influence in its many forms were to be more prominent in regeneration delivery. Do historic factors which shape local culture and regeneration processes adequately come together?

Fair trade fuel...is there really a choice for consumers?

Having stood up in a public meeting and suggested a 'fair trade fuel' (which means nothing to Marxists who seem only concerned with the notion of fair trade meaning a workers co-operative set up to avoid major stakeholders controlling trade) I do feel a little daft as this is only likely to have looked contradictory to many. 'Fair trade' tends only to operate for relatively labour intensive industries such as the farming of tea, coffee and fruit such as bananas not for those that are less labour intensive, like fuel production.

The notion of 'Fair Trade' has earned a relatively good reputation over the last few years and I like the notion of 'Fair Trade Fuel' despite the industry of fuel production requiring a less labour intensive process of production, it could be worth considering. It may appeal to the British public who may prefer to buy from Chavez or others who don't have the same links with facilitated war than the multi-nationals who appear never to be directly connected to wars that occur in nations who experience coups and violence when there is significant interest of 'oil companies' who often remain nameless and faceless. Are the mass media too strongly influenced by the same investing groups that control oil production...? I don't know what the solution is to this little conundrum and I suspect that the idea was planted elsewhere without my full awareness... are the SWP, the RESPECT coalition or any other organisation likely to be willing to influence markets so we can buy fuel with only the guilt of destroying the environment?

Has anyone got a spare few billion quid? Maybe we could get Branson and Sting together to put their names to fuel with a slightly better image: '...a not for profit fuel organisation offering proceeds to environmental projects in the developing world which will not invest in politically unstable economies or risk destabilising them.... '. Maybe one day, or maybe I should just write some more poetry....!?!

Has there been significant manipulation of the RESPECT coalition using inappropriate means?

Having been linked only relatively superficially to the RESPECT coalition I didn't make a significant impact on the party membership, their procedures or their policies. I did wonder frequently about a couple of their members and think that they may have been subject to influence to render them less likely to be of impact within a number of political forums.

I feel that it's likely that I was subject to influence in order to reduce my ability to deal with a number of situations within the party meetings, particularly in what seemed like open discussion. I don't think there will be any 'evidence' of this but I certainly think it's likely that I was subject to influence while I was still a relatively young child and not likely to be taken seriously - how would the British public feel about the far left organisations if they were comprised of people who had been subject to manipulation and engaged in politics in a manner that was likely to leave them unlikely to be successful? Furthermore, if the methods of manipulation were so absurd that if anyone who did voice concerns about the manipulation were classed as insane and potentially dangerous as a result of stating such paranoid thoughts would this be in any way acceptable political manipulation?

I have also wondered about the UKIP Party and whether or not anyone linked to that coalition felt that there were unusual methods used upon them - quite possibly there were significant problems within UKIP which have been reflected by the lack of public profile - I can't state at this point only indicate that there could have been the same methods used upon us all....