V: Procedure
You’ve probably rang up a call centre at some point in your life. I’ve been on the phone to several hundred, most of them during my time in Stream. You know when you ring them up and they transfer you to a different department? Probably not their fault. The phones are rigged on a queue system. They add you to a queue and all the calls come through in order. You can be on more than one queue at a time if they want. You could be on Tech Support and Customer Service at the same time, even if you’re not trained in both. A call could come through for bank details and you’d have no choice but to put them through to another department. Not your fault, not the customer’s fault, but you’ll probably get your face bitten off anyways.
You might call through to get your computer fixed and have to go through stupid steps like jump up and down three times, turn north and yodel. Like I mentioned before, there are usually a set of instructions that must be adhered to. If you’re caught skipping sections or going on instinct, you can get in a lot of trouble, especially if you’re wrong.
You also get timed on every call and the time between calls when you should be writing up a synopsis of the call but you’re probably goofing around and making fun of the customer. If you take too long on either, you can get in trouble. Again.
Even if you talk a customer through all the different steps and get the call done in record time, yet keep a bad log, you get in double trouble.
If you do everything right and send the details off to the next level and, God forbid, forget to ask the wind speed or the colour of their hair, you get in – Christ above! - triple trouble.
As you can see, the number of pressures upon a call centre agent are stupidly high for such a low-rung, low-paid, low-respect job. For a call centre agent, each call is as gruelling for them as it is for you.
