Call centers are weird. They treat people like cattle, and expect good outcomes.

I worked for a company that was apparently some sort of progressive beacon about 20 years ago. They treated people well, trained them for a month before they took a live call, and even promoted people out.

There was an annual cycle (this business peaked from March-September), but many employees would return and re-qualify. We used to hire 3-4 a quarter as IT techs (out of about 300 agents), and probably about half developed into either IT professionals or went back as call center managers / escalation agents.

I read that a lot of call center luminaries were former Taylorist factory managers, which would make a lot of sense if accurate.

I did it for eight months and I would never do it again barring destitution. That wasn't really the problem.

So, out of curiosity, what was?

It's a very thankless job. You get to deal with angry and frustrated people all day, every day. Their stress becomes your stress. You also have very little agency and authority because what you can and cannot do are strictly enforced by organization policy and closely tracked in a variety of ways. So unless the customer's issue fits neatly into one of several pre-defined categories and has a well-documented solution, you have to either route them to another department, or stall them long enough that they give up.

Call center work is one, maybe two notches above manual labor. You are (often) sitting at a desk in an (often) air-conditioned office, and your pay is only slightly below median. But it is soul-crushing in ways that manual labor isn't, which can quickly turn into depression.

Your time is so regimented and strictly tracked that you'll get scolded for trying to use the bathroom outside your scheduled break and you have to take scores of calls a day, many of which from people who are abusive (and to whom you can't respond in kind or even terminate the call). Also pay is heavily incentive based and the metrics are always changing out from under you.

E: here's a longer article for reference. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.psychologytoday.com/blog/th...