a hundred to a hundred and fifty calls *per day*

Life Vero has posted something about the quality of non-face to face customer service. What she said isn't wrong but did inspire me to rant incoherently in the comments for a few paragraphs. The problem in these debates is that the human being within the call centre and their situation is often overlooked; that there might be a reason why you're not getting the help you'd expect. Here's what I said there, cleaned up in a way that it really should have been before I posted:

Have worked in three call centres, here’s the problem with #3.

In call centres your average staff member can take up to a hundred to a hundred and fifty calls *per day*. Each will be sent through abruptly into your ear straight after the one before, usually after a ping in their ear or in banks a voice telling them the kind of card the person is calling about. It’s a conveyor belt of calls, all different and if it’s a busy period, each customer testy having had to wait on the line for a good long while.

In that situation, with that many customers coming through and because you’re trying to balance customer service with the business imperative it’s extraordinarily difficult not to sound tired and to be “friendly, approachable and proactive” all day. I was all of those things 90% of the time; I helped to advise other workers on how to improve their own approach.

But sometimes you can feel like a fairground boxer going rounds upon rounds with total strangers trying their hardest to knock you over. If you start taking calls at 9:00 in the am and your first call is bad, one of those calls where nothing you said was right, where there was nothing you could do and you were screamed at (which happened a lot) it was very difficult to pull yourself together in time for the very next call with the next perfectly nice customer.

That first call might play on your mind for the rest of the day impacting on all the service you're offering, your mind forever thinking back and trying to decide if there was something you could have done to make the situation better, even if, much of the time, there wasn’t because the thing had escalated beyond anything you could have done even before you got there.

Which isn't necessarily a weakness. It means you care. You want to do your best for the customer. But working in a call centre can be a frustrating business because you can’t solve every problem even if the answer seems perfectly simply because the business isn’t designed that way. Oh the stories I could tell. Plus you can't often take a moment off the phone because you've only a limited amount of off call time allowance in the day.

In addition if an advisor refuses to escalate a call to a manager it’s often because they truly can’t. In some call centres it's what the team coach does, it’s how they spend their day. In others they will not take escalations under any circumstances. It’s never consistent either. I worked in three call centres and they all had different procedures and none of them were perfect and sometimes there wasn't even a manager on the floor to be able to escalate the call to anyway.

All of which said, I too have had to horrible customer service experiences and there are some truly rotten advisors out there, but I try to assume that sometimes it's not their fault. They’ve either had precious little training before being slung on the phones (which happens a lot if they’ve been brought in from an agency) or they’ve been worn down by a culture in which the caller *expects* that they’ll be rubbish and treat them that way, grinding away the shreds of their humanity.