Hit the road, Jack

In my five years at the call centre, I have never worked a Sunday. You can imagine my dismay when I found I needed to switch a shift and the only available day I had was Sunday. I went into work with that initial attitude that I didn’t want to be there and would do anything to be allowed to go home. This is never a good way to start your day, especially when working in customer service. People can definitely pick up on your “I’d rather have my teeth pulled than talk to you right now” attitude. To my surprise, it was one of the best days I’ve ever had at work. Apart from the fact that there was a good 20 minutes between calls, it gave me a chance to talk to some co-workers that I hadn’t spoken to in months. Given that we had so much free time on our hands, we had some of the best conversations. The topics included everything from the smartest cast member of Jersey Shore (we determined there wasn’t one), to favourite places in this city to drink, to ideal places to work. This quickly led to talk of past coworkers and the way people ended up quitting the call centre.

Call centres have the highest turnover rates, which can be costly on the company. According to Price Waterhouse Coopers, employee turnover can cost 1.5 times the salary of the employee being replaced. Call centres have a turnover rate of 26% annually for full time employees and 33% for part time employees. In the last 5 years, I have seen a lot of people come and go (both from being fired or leaving on their own accord) but these are some of my favourites:

The Prank Call

One co-worker had decided he wanted to quit, but wanted to go out with a bang. For his last call, he told a customer he would call them back when he got a specialist on the line for them. He hung up and took one more call. He pulled up the customer’s account and asked to put them on hold. He then called back the first customer on line two and told them he had a representative on the other line that would be able to help them with their issue. He then conferenced the two calls together, took off his headset and walked out of the building. He obviously never came back.

Employee of the Month

This one particular girl was a bit of a psycho and used to randomly freak out on co-workers. She was definitely one of those people that everyone avoided. To our surprise, she won employee of the month last April. Needless to say, we were all completely shocked, and were beginning to lose faith in the “Employee of the Month” contest. The best part about this story is that less than a month later she was fired for having multiple complaints because she was being rude to customers. It was at that point I lost all faith in the “Employee of the Month” program.

Mr. Bomb Threat

A few years back, the call centre used to get frequent bomb threats. Someone would email in threats that a bomb was in the building, in turn shutting the entire building down while it was searched. Everyone would then go bowling while the issue was being dealt with. These bombs threats became so frequent, that you could basically plan your schedule around them, and “Bomb threat Thursdays” became a popular term among the employees. Eventually this employee was caught and fired. My favourite part of this story is the fact that, as I was walking to my desk last summer, I look across the floor and see that Mr. Bomb Threat had in fact been re-hired and was working on another campaign. At least he wasn’t voted Employee of the Month.

Needless to say, there is never a dull moment at the call centre. As I’ve said before, my co-workers are the reason I go in every day. While these ways of leaving are not professional in any way, it does give us something to laugh about when there aren’t any calls to be taking.