Pros
The people you’re working with (I said ‘with’, not *for*) are extremely friendly. There's not a colleague you will even remotely dislike. Scheduling is hit-and-miss depending on how your personal life is structured. If you have prior commitments and need to swap shifts, this isn’t a problem since your colleagues are more than happy to help you out whenever they can. If you’re looking for a permanent schedule change, that can sometimes be accommodated but it depends on your specific needs – some people have been frustrated with the way their schedules are set up weeks in advance and clash with their other (arguably more important) life commitments such as schooling. Initial training is pretty fun and you learn most of the ropes even if the Powerpoint presentation gets dry towards the end. They also provide free booze every other Friday afternoon, which is great, unless your schedule means you don’t come in to work on Friday afternoons. The incentives and games the supervisors run to keep morale from slipping are fun, but they are mostly time-limited so again, if your schedule puts your shift before or after one of these, you’re not going to be able to take part. Breaks are fair and spaced out pretty well. They’re set up in your preplanned schedule so there’s no arguing about when you take your breaks. Sundays often involve free meals cooked in the office kitchen by agents on company time, which is great. You also get free snacks on the weekends, which numbs the pain somewhat. There’s no military discipline when it comes to computer or phone use – you’re free to do what you like in between calls provided that you remain chained to your desk until your next break. The company likes to scare the fresh meat with the threat of the QA department listening in on calls, but this isn’t as scary as people think. If you do as you’re told during training and maintain a professional tone on the phones, you will never encounter any problems with anyone regarding your performance during calls. The only thing you need to worry about is your numbers, and that has nothing to do with QA. You will get emails almost every day telling you that overtime is available if you’re interested in making some extra cash (often with a GIF of a rapper throwing money in the air), which is great if that’s something you’re looking for. This is partly because the call centre seems to be a skeleton crew at the moment, so they’re probably desperate for people to work extra hours, but money is money. Evening shifts are the best, because there’s no supervisors on duty and it’s just you and three other people at most. You get to bond with these people and have casual conversations and enjoy a bit of calm, which is only occasionally interrupted by a call from some lady in Florida at 1 in the morning who just wants to know how much to have a sectional couch removed six months from now and she wasn’t going to book an appointment anyway. One great thing about the company is occasionally you will take a sales call from someone who is extremely frustrated or stressed out and you know you have the answers and can help them It feels rewarding when you do what you can for them and they can’t stop thanking you for taking a weight off their shoulders. The agents you’re with try not to take things seriously all the time, which helps when you get an irate caller that you can laugh about afterwards with your workmates. I guess that’s sort of required because you would be extremely unwell if you had to bottle it all up to yourself.
Cons
The turnover rate was shockingly high in the past couple of months, even by call centre standards. People were quitting en masse for several months now. Things at the company seem to have reached a boiling point recently. Some employees who have been here for many years and have consistently been considered some of the top sales agents in terms of bookings have quit, or rumoured to have been fired out of the blue, which is extremely unusual for any number of reasons including the fact that call centre turnover means that most people will quit within a few months to a year anyway – why would you actively let go somebody who’s been loyal for much longer? It’s a morale dampener in the sense that the company is sending a message that nobody is safe and you have no idea what you can do to avoid being next. The company gleefully takes advantage of their legal right to terminate without cause, to the point where they have been known to show people the door without any warning. You can be doing comparable numbers to everyone else or even kill it on the phones, but a day or two later you can come in and the same people will call you into a room to tell you that you’ve been fired, you’ve no idea why, and everyone else on the sales floor is blindsided by this. This has happened to more than one person within a short period of time and everyone can see it. The supervisors often like to use the phrase ‘not a good fit’ when describing people who have been let go – this is their Get Out of Employment Standards Tribunal Free card. And what happens after all these people quit or have been disappeared? Nothing! We keep hearing that they’re bringing in new agents to take the load off, but until that actually happens, everyone who’s left is overworked, paid the same, and the phones keep ringing (side note: if a customer needs something gone right now and doesn’t book because a truck is unavailable, you lose that sale and it counts as a hit against you – I’m sorry that I wasn’t able to conjure a truck team out of thin air). Since there’s not that many people working the phones as it is, it stresses everyone else out and it shows in your conversion. It’s not for lack of space or anything – there are rows of empty desks and chairs just begging for people to sit on them. Another problem is the lack of coaching once you’ve finished training and you hit the phones. You’re basically thrown to the wolves armed with nothing but your headset, a computer, and fake psychology sales tips pinned to the cubicle walls. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve received proper one-to-one coaching. Given the lack of warm bodies and the scheduling in which there’s only about three other people in your cubicle farm, there should be more than enough face time to go around for everyone who needs help, but supervisors seem to be more keen to sit at their computers and jump behind you in the middle of a call, throwing you off while you have a live person on the line while your supervisor directs you to say things. Even when you tell your team captain what you think you need help with, they will not really use it to coach you in a professional setting to handle it, preferring instead to just whisper to you to ‘say this!!!!’ to the customer when you’re on the phones and throwing their hands up in defeat when it doesn’t work and the customer says no anyway. Unfortunately, not everyone is going to book even with the greatest will in the world, especially during specific days and times when callers are known to be less likely to book and more likely to say no, unless you are blessed with the gift of mind control. Sales agents are the most important part of the whole enterprise and yet our value is minimal given the way we are treated, in terms of scheduling, guidance, and respect. You have no idea what your targets are because you’re told it doesn’t really matter, and yet your conversion numbers are posted everywhere: they’re company-wide knowledge and emailed to every single agent every morning. This sends a mixed message – on the one hand numbers aren’t everything, but on the other that’s all your supervisors talk about and that’s all you see. And if you’re scheduled to work certain hours (it is a 24-hour call centre after all) such as evenings or holidays when the conversion rate is going to be far worse than usual? Good luck! Nobody takes that into account when they look at your numbers. The only positive is your colleagues aren’t the type to judge you poorly for them, but it does bring about a personal sense of shame seeing your numbers placed between everyone else’s if you’ve had a bad day.
