Confessions of a Call Center Agent

Most of us will agree that the call center agent/advisor/representative experience directly imprints on the customer experience. Had a bad day? The customer will sense it. Frustrated by a supervisor’s lack of constructive criticism? The customer will hear it. Not empowered to solve problems outside the script? The customer will know it.

As a leader in the customer experience industry, I have sat in countless boardrooms, from Fortune 50 firms to small startups, discussing the optimal customer experience. We, as leaders, wanted to better understand the employee experience, and we would ask the functional operations managers for reports, flow diagrams, and day-in-the-life descriptions of the call center employee experience. Outside of taking a few customer calls or hosting an agent roundtable, there never seemed to be time to go through the full experience of being an agent. 

As an advisor to the CEO of a $100M+ outsourced work-at-home call center, I have recently taken the plunge to become a secret shopper-equivalent for the customer service representative employee experience, providing support for a $200B healthcare client. Here is what I’ve learned so far in my first month on the job.

Being a Customer Service Rep Requires an Exceptional Level of Grit

The 6-week customer service training started December 1. My classmates and I are excited about the new work-from-home opportunity, but it doesn’t start off smoothly as a third of us realize we were provided broken equipment. Additionally, our training schedule includes both Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve, and there is no upside above the $12/hour base pay rate for working these days. Some of us just learned this job involves supporting members of a major health plan, and it doesn’t sound like the customer service job we expected. While I’m using my home computer for training, some of my new colleagues are training on their phones. Two weeks have passed, and some of us still don’t have full access to the client tools we need and won’t have the access when we start to work with customers during the upcoming week-long trial period. It is chaotic and frightening, but it is peak season for the health plan, and some of my colleagues share how lucky they feel to have a job. 

The Employee Safety Net Gets Thin Very Quickly

A few weeks in, I am having an experience I know the company leaders don’t want me to have. I know it will work out if we stick with training, but some of my new colleagues tell me they are beginning to doubt their chances of success. The health plan wasn’t able to provide systems access to my class quickly enough, so instead of a train-then-practice iterative approach, we will train on all material for 4 weeks and do our best to immediately handle complex customer calls. Some supervisors are learning the client material alongside us and can’t offer much more than holding us accountable for attendance and performance. This won’t go well for many of us. 

Friction in the Employee Experience will Result in Most of Us Leaving

It’s not uncommon for employee attrition to trend in the 80% range in the customer service industry. That means, for an initial wave of 1000 employees, 67 will leave every month due to lengthy training, low pay, or lack of support and trust. It’s a ubiquitous dirty secret in the industry and leads to unbelievably difficult customer service issues. My first calls go ok, but another agent has a customer yelling at her and requesting a supervisor. The agent has two small children at home and is working from her bedroom. She is in tears. The learning processes are so antiquated that, if she misses a training day due to a sick child, she cannot catch up via self-paced learning. At this point, she risks getting behind or being terminated. The wages for agents managing this complex customer contact will remain low as attrition-related costs stay high, and lower company margins prevent investment in technology that can help agents succeed. In this situation, the employee suffers first, and then the customer.

Three Steps to Take as a Customer Leader and Advocate

1. Talk to Agents as Frequently as Customers. Find the Truths Beyond Boardroom Reports. I started this project with the hypothesis that observing the class and listening to calls would provide a transparent view, but it wasn’t until I started working with the agents and supervisors that I truly understood. 
2. Forward-Invest in Technology To Remove Agent-Experience Friction. The CEO of the company is working to shift from sending agents company-shipped laptops, that show up late or inoperable, to a cloud-based solution that will remove 80% of the agents’ technical and connectivity issues. Many firms wait too long to upgrade and invest, reacting only when skyrocketing attrition and potential customer loss force the issue. By acting in advance, you may see a 10X return on investment and avoid the problem altogether.
3. Create a Culture of Being Agent-Obsessed. Find issues agents are dealing with, work with your team to solve them, and then celebrate the success company-wide. My CEO partner has committed to solving the top three agent issues involving tech, training, and pay. He assigned leadership of each initiative to his direct reports and will measure and track progress each week at the C-suite level. He also hired me to investigate from the ground up and be a strategic agent-advocate. As we solve each issue in Q1, we will celebrate the success broadly before moving to the next opportunity. 

Share Your Thoughts

Where have you seen interesting examples of leaders advocating for customer-facing employees? What else should we touch on in the next article about the customer experience? I’d love to hear your experience. Thumbs up if you agree and comment below if you have something to add.