They are there, they are necessary in a certain way and they employ a lot of people, some experts even predict that by 2010 around 12% of the EU workforce might be employed by them, but rarely nothing more than that is known about this industry…….what are the activities they do behind their doors?, why are there so many of them?, who usually gets employed there?, how are the working conditions? etc.

After some small investigation with common citizens, candid opinions of former employees, recruitment offices, online forums, printed articles and the results of a EU conference on call centres from 2002, I found and concluded some interesting things.
There are 3 main divisions of Call Centres. One covers sales and merchandise, excellent for people who have great sales abilities and a desire to sell services or products to your neighbour that might be located in the other side of the continent.

The second is purely dedicated to the Tourism Industry. Managing reservations, bookings, questions, complaints etc from resorts that might be in the “sunny south”. Usually the people who studied and enjoy working in tourism will find this more suitable.
And there is a third division, dealing directly with all the technical difficulties of having a personal computer in your house or office, its related peripherals, software, anti viruses, etc. In this case it should interest more the people with knowledge of Information Technology.

Generally you would find two types of call centres, the a) in-house and b) outsourced or offshore ones.

The in-house is defined as the centre operating inside a long established company, usually sharing the space with other internal departments.

The outsourced or offshore ones take their place on companies specially designed and conceived to manage and process incoming or outgoing calls. Companies that don’t require big investment and big space. Usually managing a wide catalogue of businesses from different working sectors. Therefore they become the first contact and human face of the clients they are representing.

How do these people who had worked in the Call Centers feel? What are their opinions, comments and recommendations?

Well, 90% of the employees interviewed that had worked in an in-house type centre had good impressions; they said the working environment was very professional, friendly and well rewarded. Real possibilities of going up the latter in the company existed, and usually the people left after 2-3 years of working there, either moving within the company or to pursue other challenges. They had the opinion that the job indeed carried its bad moments like all jobs and recommended it to people who like to talk on the phone and are sociable, never get personal with the comments of angry customers and are able to listen to criticism in a good way, like to work closely guided by someone else and enjoy the good moments and money that comes with this job.

Now, 90% of the people who had worked in outsourced centres had the opposite opinions. The employees complained that in some cases there was internal bullying and shouting; ultra tense working environment; sometimes they were asked to wear a business suit even if they would never see the customers in person; few working benefits or they never stayed long enough to see them; ethical sales problems with duty managers and even extreme things as to have to ask permission to their duty manager to go to the Toilet, and many other bad comments that crossed the line of being ridiculous.

Some people who promote this job creation and recruitment have the opinion that these are good jobs for brushing upon your languages, specially English if you are coming from outside, to find new friends, business connections and have fun in general.
They sometimes offer a great deal of magnets to attract candidates even going to the distance of paying the plane tickets of someone who lives in Denmark, Sweden or Iceland and paying them part of the relocation costs. They say the big turnover is caused by many people simply leaving Ireland after making money to not to come back for some time or they want to experiment other careers and they leave happy with no complaints. They also offer access to social clubs, gyms, discounts in travelling, free products, healthcare, canteen, etc.

It seems these centres have become very desperate, locating and employing the “perfect candidate”.

Other job recruiters that don’t manage this industry simply had the short opinion that this activity was boring .

The conclusion, is that people don’t stay there long because in the majority of the occasions they are just transitional jobs: a job for the moment, for the season, to make fast money for your college, etc. Plus it’s clear that whatever the division, it’s for certain kind of characters only!

As you can see, mainly negative feedback is concentrated on the outsourced centres. Even the recommendations and results of the EU conference from 2002 detected that the majority of problems and complaints occurred on the outsourced ones.

The Call Centres are not evil at all, some are just not being completely honest, some are doing social deregulation: in means of competition they diminish the working conditions and some are making huge mistakes in the way they want their prospective employees to be.

These centres should promote themselves differently, not trying to recruit people in mass or searching for “supermen” with tons of abilities.

Another negative aspect is that they are monopolizing the IT sector, not to mention the linguistic studies and sales area. Trying to fuse two different sectors and adding sales into the mix in an assembly line atmosphere won’t work in a long term. They have to acknowledge this growing problem and deal with it in a proper way.

The Call Centre Industry will either change, relocate or simply disappear…..and they will be remembered in the future as a symptom of our fast paced, money oriented, stressed, materialistic societies some of us live in these days. Peace.