Call centres are great places for people from all backgrounds and ages to work

A guide to the benefits of call centre based work

When you mention the term contact centre at a dinner party it’s often received with a negative response as many people think of cold callers or long waiting times on customer service lines. How often have you heard someone tell you about a positive experience they have had? Even though they will have had many a good experience with excellent customer service advisors. Not only do you find many people have a negative view of the service contact centres provide but they also assume that they cannot be pleasant places to work. If these people had actually worked in a contact centre then maybe they would have a different view as I am sure many of the workers will argue they are great places to work and far from the sweatshop image they have inherited.

On the whole, working in a contact centre is a fun job where people have a ‘work hard, play hard’ mentality with many of the leading agencies offering incentives and career progression ensuring good job satisfaction. The flexible hours and social aspect of the job attract many young workers (including students) who develop friendships outside work, which will inevitably make going to work more pleasurable no matter what the job! There are many different types of job that people do within the business and some may not be as enjoyable or interesting as others, but in a contact centre, because there are so many more people doing the same job, there is a much greater sense of “in it together”. It doesn’t matter whether you are doing inbound call handling or making outbound telesales calls, the environment is always busy with everyone working towards both individual and team targets.

If you work in an outsourced contact centre there are likely to be many different clients being served so the products and services will vary from one team to another. This gives the staff the opportunity to work on a campaign that may be of particular interest. The mobile phone industry is a great example where the more ‘techy’ types will be much more adapt to working in a technical support role helping customers overcome technical issues. In another example, companies will look for more talkative, sales type individuals to work in the telesales roles where they will be looking to sell over the phone.

It doesn’t matter which role you fulfil within a contact centre, you will always face irate people on the other end of the phone. Unlike IVR services (Interactive Voice Response) where you don’t actually speak with people, customers will happily be rude or shout if they are not happy about something. While this certainly isn’t pleasant, it is character building for the contact centre workers who will quickly learn to develop their customer services skills and benefit from valuable experience communicating with people. As well as receiving induction training, calls are monitored so there are always on-going reviews to help develop workers’ skills further.

Once the hard work is over, contact centres are great places to start an evening out. With many shifts ending at 8 or 9pm people are ready to have an evening out and management often support social gatherings after work. If you are on a basic salary with sales based commission then paydays often tend to be the big night out for everyone to spend their hard earned money.

So next time you hear someone bad mouth a contact centre you may well want to ask them if they have ever worked in one! With the above in mind you can confidently tell them that nearly 1,000,000 people work at over 5,000 contact centres in the UK and most of them like their jobs.

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