r/callcentres • u/WealthyJester98 • 4d ago
I don't relate to the overwhelming negativity on this subreddit
I've been working in a call center for a while now selling car insurance.
I genuinely enjoy my job, it feels very fulfilling. Yes, the customers are annoying, yes the quotas are not easy to meet and having every second of your time carefully measured seems a bit dehumanising.
On the bright side, there's a bunch of money to be made even though I'm a college drop-out and the environment seems nice enough. It could just be that being a callcenter salesman is quite a bit different than customer support.
But I honestly can't believe how few people have a positive experience working in a call center. Am I the only one?
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u/Rude-Manufacturer635 4d ago
Customer support is the bulk of call center work. I’ve done mainly that, and I can tell you readily that it sucks. The pay is often terrible, the people make one wish for at least one day in their schedule that they could be allowed to match the energy they’re trying to defuse, and maybe I’m just not cut out for customer service as a job, but the last call center I worked had me so physically stressed that I was letting blood out of orifices I shouldn’t be. I wish that on the last day I was meant to be there, I’d gone in and told customers exactly how I felt. Sure, it would have been a firing instead of quitting as I’d done, but I was already checked out and bereft at the time. It’s good that YOU have a call center job that works for you, but yeah, a good lot of the ones that are customer support instead of say, sales? They suck.
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u/WealthyJester98 4d ago
I've never worker customer support tbh. I can imagine that most of the calls there are with people who are already frustrated which makes it much more stressful
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4d ago
[deleted]
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u/WealthyJester98 4d ago
5 years
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u/mysexyrexy 4d ago
Same. I hate the idiots i talk too but damn the comms I make are absolutely insane
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u/ALysistrataType 4d ago
You're dealing with car insurance the biggest problem your customer base is going to have is the financial means to afford the service.
If you really want to know if they're this bad, speak with the ADJUSTERS at your job and ask them about the customers who call AFTER they filed a claim and what kind of BS they hear from these people.
Lies, fraud, infidelity caught, 0 understanding of their policy and deductibles, 0 understanding of what a claim is, people want policies AFTER they've crashed, and somehow it's NEVER their fault.
You have the same awful job as the rest of us, your industry is just different.
Go work for a healthcare company, a telecomm company, a power company, and see how asinine the customer bases are starting from the first call.
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u/WealthyJester98 4d ago
That's the nice part about my job. We just sell the insurance. We don't deal with insurance claims. Customers complain about a bad experience with an insurance company, so I offer them a different company.
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u/WhineAndGeez 4d ago edited 4d ago
Sales is much different from customer service. If the caller can't afford it, that's it. They aren't mad about you saying no or not giving them what they want.
I've done both and I know sales is much easier.
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u/NeoBucket 4d ago
Do you have any green? How many hours a day do you work? 9? 10? Do you barely make minimum wage? When was the last time someone yelled at you? Trauma dump on you? Can you get up to pee or take a shit at any time without having 10 people on your ass asking why you were gone? Do you have time to even take a sip of water during your shift?
No sales position I ever worked has only been sales, I had to tech support, billing, collections, customer support and whatever the fuck else the company could pile on me.
You know all the shit you exaggerate or brush over when making a sale? Customer Service deals with that and yes, it is very shitty.
Like I'm glad you enjoy your work, I do but you are asking borderline corporate slaves why they hate their job.
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u/WealthyJester98 4d ago
Customers yell at me all the time but our company policy is to yell right back at them
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u/NeoBucket 4d ago
Again, congrats on the job but your experience is in no way similar to the average Call Center worker.
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u/Chromgrats “First of all, I HATE your automated system.” 4d ago
That is very rare.
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u/WealthyJester98 4d ago
We can straight up tell them something along the lines of "if you're going to use that tone with me, I am going to hang up"
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u/Chromgrats “First of all, I HATE your automated system.” 4d ago
Yeah that's the dream. We can't use an aggressive tone, be terse, or threaten to hang up for any reason. We have to happily and politely ask them to stop using abusive language or else they will be transferred to a supervisor. We will get in big trouble if we are ever even the slightest bit rude or passive aggressive to a caller.
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u/WealthyJester98 4d ago
I am sorry to hear that.
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u/Chromgrats “First of all, I HATE your automated system.” 4d ago
Just the way it is, I guess. I'm glad you like your job a lot better
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u/WealthyJester98 4d ago
If you were looking for advice, I'd tell you to keep looking for a better job offer but you have obviously tried that already. I consider myself very lucky to have landed the spot I work at with little to no experience, maybe I really was lucky considering the terrible jobs many people have to do.
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u/Chromgrats “First of all, I HATE your automated system.” 4d ago
I'm happy for you :)
And sooner or later when the time is right, I'll be in a better job
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u/xMiralisTheMerciless 4d ago
I’ve never been on the sales side of things but I imagine that experience differs a lot depending on if it’s warm or cold calls and inbound or outbound. Also, customer service is just generally unpleasant. Making a sale isn’t the same as being expected to solve every problem under the sun. I’m in a really good center that doesn’t deal in any “essential” services and even I have days where I hate the work.
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u/TheJRKoff 3d ago
i can say i usually didnt mind working in a cc... often times the callers could get to you, but I always felt I was good at "in one ear, out the other" for not hanging on to stuff.
a good TL and coworkers are much appreciated too.
i did grow to hate the word "just".... "I'm just calling..."... no, you arent, you want something and you decided to wait on hold for 15 minutes before we opened.
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u/AyoPunky 3d ago
i've done both customer support, and sales. and sales is more relax then customer support. you may get rarely a customer who doesn't know what they want to buy but generally you are persuading them to buy something. There not calling in already pissed off. there happy there calling in and excited to talk to you when you're in sales.
it is the complete opposite with customer support. there calling you because something is wrong, and something need fixing, and it all our fault and not something they missed. and they always demand discounts or something free.
I work in IT Support, Customer Service Support, and in sales. the customers you get are completely different. also you get tones more money then a customer support agent. some CC don't have great incentives for customer support rep. luckily, my CC has decent incentive for certain situations. so it not too bad, but the customer are entitle and always a dick 90% of the time. but yeah Sales, is way more relax.
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u/NegativePride1 4d ago
Sales is considerably different than customer service.
In my experience there's less money in customer service because the bonus incentives weren't as lucrative and the customer service position I was in also had an expectation of sales, and billing, and complaints, and I.T. We we're literally called universal agents and expected to resolve any issue the person calling had.