Behind the Scenes of a Customer Service Hotline
By: Claudio Lintunen
Tags: Human Interaction, Customer Service, Work, Experience

Next time you do this, think about the person on the other end | Photo source

Every time you pick up your phone and call a company’s customer service, chances are high that your call will be connected to a call center, where a (hopefully) friendly Customer Service Representative will receive your call. Or a robot, who can’t answer your questions and will redirect you to a CSR.

When you have a problem with something, it’s understandable that you’re frustrated, even angry. That’s okay — you’re entitled to your feelings. Just take a few deep breaths before calling in, and remind yourself that the person on the other end is not guilty of causing the issue, and yelling at them doesn’t get you anywhere. It just ruins another human being’s day, and possible wrecks their mental health. Here’s what is going on behind the scenes.

Relocation

Here in Europe, these call centers are often located in cheaper countries, such as Spain, Eastern Europe, and the Baltics. In need of native speakers of certain languages that the hiring company wants to offer their customer service in, they offer “good” relocation packages. This is a good way of luring young people to move abroad to work on a minimal salary.

In my case, the call center in question was located in the Baltics. The company paid for my flights and paid for my accommodation in a hotel near the office for the first 30 days. Upon arrival, I was picked up from the airport by a Team Leader and taken to my hotel. She handed me an envelope that included info about the company, its rules, and my job. There was also a little bit of info about the city and a bus ticket with either 5€ or 10€ credit.

The hotel itself was far from a 5-star hotel, which I first imagined it to be as a young lad without any practical life experience. Instead, it was a fairly old, somewhat small building, located in a suburb quite far from the city center. The area might’ve not been the very best in the city, but yet far from the worst as I was to find out on my expeditions. My room was tiny. The walls and floors seemed paper-thin, as I could clearly hear people walking, talking, and doing things I’d prefer not to mention here, in the adjacent rooms.

A breakfast buffet was included, but the bacon was often black and oversalted, the porridge was cold, the orange juice was too bland, etc.

But I was happy to have a roof over my head.

Training

No previous experience was required from us and they promised extensive training before starting on the line. We had two weeks of 6–8 hours per day of theory in a classroom, followed by a week on the line with a senior CSR sitting next to you, listening to your calls and interfering if things would get out of hand. After that, you were “on your own”. Of course, you could always ask your colleagues, but on busy days, where everyone was occupied and unavailable to assist you, it wasn’t that easy.

On my first weeks, even months, on the line, I faced so many issues that I wasn’t trained to solve, and required constant advice from senior employees. New issues kept appearing all the time, and even after a year in the house, I still had to bother others occasionally. On busy days, when the line was burning (lots of waiting calls), and everyone would be on the phone, and I would face an issue I didn’t know how to solve — those situations were unbearable. Either I would let the customer wait on the line until someone was free to assist me or give very ambiguous answers to get them to end the call ASAP. You’ll understand why the latter option was so tempting later in this article.

I wish the training would’ve been even more in-depth and would’ve focused more on the real-world challenges, rather than useless “nice-to-knows”.

Along with the job contract, we had to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA), to prevent us from sharing any sensitive details about our job, and to this day I am still under that contract, so I can’t go too much in detail here.

Salary and employment

Different lines were paid differently. The local language and Russian speaking lines were paid the least, and — from what I heard — the barrier to replace employees was far lower than on other lines, as in the Baltics there isn’t exactly a shortage of bilinguals, whereas there is a shortage of jobs. I don’t remember any specific numbers for their salaries — all I know is that it was barely average or even below the local average pay for a typical 9-to-5 office job.

We, the Scandinavians, were on “top of the hill”, getting paid significantly more than our Baltic colleagues. But compared to the salaries back at home (over 50–100% more), it wasn’t such a good deal. Sure, it was well above the local average, and thus allowed me to get a good apartment and go out often, but if I was to visit Finland for holidays, I would’ve been broke in no-time.

First, there was the base salary, which was around 30% above the local average for us Scandinavians, and on top of that, there were the bonuses, which are discussed in detail next.

Performance

To receive the full salary (base + bonuses), you had to fill the requirements for efficiency and accuracy. Even if you were fine with losing your bonuses, the company wasn’t. Reaching the goals was a big deal, and we were constantly reminded of it.

The bonuses were paid based on two factors — “Quality” and “AHT”.

“Quality” refers to the score of the weekly reviews of up to four of your calls, selected randomly by the Quality Analyst. The target score was 100 (out of 100) to get your bonus, which was more than 100€ — that was more than 15% of my salary. Every serious or even semi-serious mistake that you made during the call dropped your score, and just a single error in handling the call could’ve cost you that 100€.

“AHT” or Average Handling Time measures the monthly average of the time you took to finish the calls in seconds. The Client that we worked for was dropping the AHT target almost bi-monthly and thus required us to be even faster with our already demanding job. Different lines had different targets based on the call volumes. For the Finnish line, it was around 210 seconds at some point, but it gradually dropped to about 180 seconds. For another line, it was often closer to 140s — that’s less than three minutes!

Remember the last time you got your complex issue solved and received good service in under three minutes? Me neither.

The AHT didn’t only count the call duration, but the overall time it took to wrap up everything. At some point we switched to a new CRM system and had to fill in even more details after the call, slowing down the process of wrapping it up. When the call ended, the system automatically switched your status to “After-call” and the clock kept ticking. More than a few times I forgot it on for over an hour, ruining my AHT for that month, and losing my bonus just because I forgot to change my status. It was tempting to switch myself to “Email” status when wrapping up, where the timer would stop, and I wouldn’t receive calls, but it was forbidden. I still did it in order to reach the unrealistic goals.

Migrating to the new (slower) CRM system and lowering our AHT goals significantly happened almost simultaneously.

Stupid decisions, that only made the employees’ work slower, and their life harder, were made all the time, and yet we were expected to work faster while keeping the level of service sky-high. Apparently, the call center charges their Clients per second, and the Client wanted to cut the costs.

I was constantly struggling to keep my AHT below the target, as I failed to finish the interactions quickly enough. I considered myself mostly unlucky because I always got the hour-long calls where a granny would call in for help with resetting her password on the service’s website, or a frustrated customer would yell at me as long as they possibly can without breathing, and resume after a quick breath until their negative energy was depleted.

We had monthly 1-on-1 meetings with our Team Leaders to discuss our performance. But despite all the tête-à-têtes, where we would try to find out how I can be faster, those long calls just kept coming, and there was nothing I could do to finish them any faster without breaking the rules.

No matter how much I wished to be able to help those poor grannies reset their passwords, and chat with them for the whole day, or hang up on those pricks who would intentionally make my life difficult and ruin my day just because something didn’t work exactly the way they expected it to, I couldn’t.

I had to prioritize my service’s speed over quality (because you can’t focus on both, and hanging up was unfortunately forbidden) to not get fired. Luckily we, the Scandinavians, were too hard to replace for the company to fire easily. That might have to do with how I was able to stay there for a year, not reaching the goals on most months.

Speaking of being hard to replace, the company was constantly looking for more Scandinavians to join them. We were offered up to 1000€ (10+ months’ salary for us) if we would get one of our friends to relocate, and work there for a year. We once had a campaign, where anyone who would provide the HR with a Swedish CV would get a free pizza. I hit up a Swedish internet “acquaintance” of mine, that I barely knew, asked for his CV, and forwarded it. They wouldn’t have given me my pizza if I didn’t ask for it multiple times over the next few weeks. Once I got it, it was gigantic and they took pictures of me with it to post on the company’s internal blog — “Hey look at this guy, he got a free pizza for trying to recruit his friend! Lucky guy! Look at how generous we are if you please us!”

Such propaganda, but at least the pizza was tasty.

Work environment

At this particular call center, we were located in a modern, relatively spacious, open office. Although there weren’t any assigned seats (except for the HR, Team Leaders, and QAs) CSRs of the same lines liked to sit together. Each work station had a good office chair, but quite old technical equipment (keyboard, mouse, headset). There was a small divider between the work stations to give a sense of privacy.

The cheap over-ear headsets were very uncomfortable to wear after a while, and in the noisy environment, it was hard to hear anything from them, as it was often hard also for the customer to hear us.

Phones and note-taking equipment were banned from the office for the employees and had to be left in the lockers in the hallway. Books were barely allowed, as for some lines it was often quiet, and since our internet access was limited to only a few whitelisted websites in addition to the web-based tools, we would’ve been bored to death without some kind of activity. Especially Sundays were so quiet, that most of us working then (~6–8 people in total) just sat together, playing cards, and answering the calls as they came in.

When a call came in, we would hear a long beep in our headsets and have a second or two to take a breath before the call came in automatically.

Angry customers, threats, and breakdowns

If only it was just nice people calling in to quickly check where is our nearest office to them and thank you for the good service. If only.

Almost daily, at least one of us would receive a call from someone, who’s biggest problem was not the technical issues they were facing, but rather anger management issues. They would call in and often start by just yelling at us. No matter how we tried to calm them down, listen to them, and help them resolve their issue, they wouldn’t listen. I believe the longest call I had was nearly 1,5 hours. One and a half hours of listening to rage. Only if the customer would ask to speak to a supervisor, were we allowed to transfer the call, but it had to come from them — we couldn’t suggest it to them.

In rare cases, where the customer asked to speak to someone else than you or you were unable to handle the call, you could transfer them to a colleague.

These kinds of calls were always challenging, especially for the more sensitive ones. Several times, I witnessed a colleague break into tears and call it a day after listening to the rage, blaming, threats, and personal insults for too long.

They would indirectly or even directly blame us for causing their issue. They would sometimes give us personal insults or even threats.

The most common threat was of course “I will never use your services again”, which had the lightest impact on us. Like I would care — it’s not my company.

Then there were the legal threats, which were a bit harder to handle, because you never knew, if the customer actually is a lawyer, as they claimed to be. They would threaten to sue the company or worse, sue us personally for whatever reason.

Last, but not least, there were the death threats. Though it was calming to know that they don’t know your identity (you only told your first name) and that there are a few seas and countries between us, it was impossible not to take these threats seriously. Once a customer sent us an email, promising to deliver our heads to the local post office.

These customers often failed to understand, that the problem was caused by several elements of the company together and CSR ≠ company. They are called “representatives” for a reason — they represent the company, but that’s all that they have to do with it. The issues you are facing with a service are not the fault of the CSR. They are the ones dealing with the mess that the company has made.

If this taught me something, it’s the ability to operate under stress and handle difficult people. After a while, I learned that just staying calm and letting them vent without trying to interrupt them, usually did the trick. It was amazing how many times someone who I imagined to be a hungry wolf at the beginning of the call, would turn in to a nice little puppy saying “thank you” and “I’m sorry” at the end of it.

How to get your issue solved quickly

This varies from company to company and issue to issue, but here are a couple of rules of thumb, that will help you and the CSR.