The Michigan Telephone blog

The Detroit Free Press is running an interesting article entitled “Busier signals at call centers” – it’s in the business section, and near the top of the article they make this observation:

As wildly popular as the Do Not Call List has been with consumers, it’s among the things that have been rough on telemarketers, who have seen more than a million jobs disappear nationwide, 137,000 in Michigan.

Gee, let’s all take a moment to shed a tear for the telemarketers who are unable to ply their trade. Okay, that’s long enough.  The bright side is that they will now probably be able to have an uninterrupted dinnertime with their families, just like the rest of us who have signed up for the do-not-call list.  I have been criticized in the past for not showing empathy for telemarketers who have lost their jobs, but c’mon – it’s a crap job to begin with, and all they do is annoy a large number of people in order to make a profit for some company that couldn’t care less about them.  I guess I should also feel empathy for drug dealers who have been arrested and can no longer support their families by plying their trade. Give me a break. But, as it turns out, there is some good news for these folks…

Telemarketing jobs may be in for a rebound. While the outbound, or sales call, portion of the industry has deflated, the inbound, or customer service call centers, are growing, Jonathan Means, senior vice president for Kelly Services Inc. in Troy, the global staffing company, said Tuesday. ….. “Contact center business is coming back to the United States,” Means said. “There was a trend of outsourcing those calls to India, and you know the horror stories. Companies have discovered that there is lost business when people have a bad call experience.”

It turns out that’s it’s all a matter of who initiates the call.  We hate the telemarketer that calls us during dinnertime, but if we are calling a customer service rep, we tend to prefer speaking to someone who knows our language and understands our culture.  When call centers are outsourced to other countries, the folks there often do not understand American expectations for customer service, and then when the American caller gets frustrated with the call center employee for not providing the expected level of service and raises their voice, the call center employee often tends to take it much more personally than an American would.  Americans, at least, usually understand each other – we have certain cultural norms and expectations that are difficult for people in other countries to understand, and we don’t like talking to someone (particularly on the telephone) that has such a thick accent that we have difficulty understanding them.

Seriously, I hope that all the Americans who are working in telemarketing can get jobs as inbound call center reps – that’s a win-win situation! Fewer people out there to annoy us, and more people to take our calls when we really want to talk to them.

Of course, there may be one downside – if anything like karma actually exists, once they start taking inbound calls, the former telemarketers will be the ones who get the rudest and most annoying callers. And if they have to work through the dinner hour, the bulk of the calls will come right when they are trying to grab a few bites out of a sandwich or a snack!

(By the way – I realize that employees from call centers in other parts of the world just might stumble across this blog, so I will just say this much – I understand that you folks need jobs, too. But if you want to service the rest of the English-speaking world, you need to do these things:  First, take elocution lessons, or speech lessons or whatever they call it in your part of the world,  so you can learn to talk with an accent similar to that of the majority of your callers.  Second, try to appear enthusiastic about solving the customer’s problem – the laid back, “I don’t care, it’s just a job” attitude really offends callers.  When we tell you that something went wrong, we want you to be as concerned about getting it right as we are, or at least to try to appear that way.  Third, actually solve the problem – if you can’t, immediately pass the call on to someone who can – don’t waste the customer’s time. If you can’t do that, even if it’s because of your employer’s policies, you’d best be seeking other employment. Fourth, understand that if a caller raises the volume of their voice, that is usually an indication that they feel you are not solving their problem, or are delaying them unnecessarily.  It does not mean that you are a bad person, but it does mean you need to re-evaluate your approach to helping that customer, or maybe it just means you need to shut up and listen to what the customer is telling you. If you tend to internalize it when a caller raises their voice, or even occasionally uses profanity, then you need to be in another line of work!)