plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
French Proverb
Twenty years ago when I had my first formal job at a call center, the industry was still young. Everyone knew the idea was to get people to buy or contribute as much as po$$ible over the phone, but no one really twisted any arms. Callers used their natural charms and genuine attitudes about life to convince people to do something, and it had to be something they wanted to call about. Of course, this was before the general erosion of trust had destroyed 80% of Americans’ feelings about people and their motives, before telemarketing became a common daily occurrence, before 9/11, before the mortgage crisis, before the poisonous BP oil disaster, before gas prices rose to $4 a gallon in the U.S., before the rich versus poor gap widened so much that it resembled the fault at the border of the Pacific Plate, before the tsunami of 2004 that released energy the magnitude of 23,000 Hiroshima-style atomic bombs, before Hurricane Katrina and the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, several presidents ago…before the continuing stockmarket crashes that parallel these natural and unnatural disasters.
There is no longer much trust in each other, and young people of all nations do not have a secure future to look forward to. They have seen their parents struggle, and some have seen their parents fail. Many people are willing to learn to say anything at all on the phone to earn a living.
Thus, in 2012, the dilemma: how to run a call center? And how to run a call center so you get lots of work and can still face yourself in the mirror?
The latest ideas have revolved around what software to use to “manage” the calls and the call center and thus keep callers on their toes; how to keep training callers due to the constant turnover–formerly known to create business failure but now considered par for the course; and now, finally, where to outsource calls to–India or the Philippines–since U.S. workers demand to be paid “too much.” Note that all of this is about volume and turnover and bottom line, as if people really were dollar bills being spewed out on an assembly line and there will always be an endless supply of them…and thus, they are expendable…anything but human. This is the way companies and workers in the U.S. have been living. In fact, it has been shown to be the case that training good English-speaking callers and keeping them will, in the long run, make your call center more profitable to high-end companies. By the way, it is also better for all the people involved.
It seems that our current ideas of how to run a call center demonstrate all of the problems and cycles of thinking and management theory we have flipped through in the past twenty or thirty years, including the idea of “human capital.” I’m talking about human management; remember, what management originally meant was the way to get people to do their best. But now management has become an ugly word, and in practice often means the best way to manipulate people, lie to them, herd them in one direction and then another, and then, finally, when they least expect it, let them go.
Education and health are now termed “investments” in human capital; in other words, it is good for people to be healthy and smart. Why can’t we simply say that? In a time when the value of real investments is questionable, does the comparison of human benefits to capital–or people to money–inspire us? Is it sincere? After what we have seen of our investments, such a comparison seems blind and heartless. For if our human capital is to be managed by the same reckless forces that managed our major companies, stocks, banks, and governments– why would we want to use the term human capital? It has an eerie, Orwellian feel to it; ask any of the shareholders who collectively lost $11 billion when Enron collapsed, taking their retirement pensions, hopes, and dreams with it.
Here is my memory of working part-time in a prominent U.S. call center in 1993, right after I moved and was suddenly teaching not full-time but only part-time at a college.
The call center manager was a guy about 45, which in those days meant that he had some education and, given that he had lived through the 1960’s, had people-centered and earth-friendly values. He wasn’t rich, but he had a simple house and was generally happy in his life. He also made everyone at work happy: he complimented us when we did well, explained why something we said was or wasn’t effective, and sincerely believed in the companies we called on behalf of. Technology? We had the latest equipment, and it was adequate for what we did, and no new expensive software will help the bottom line if your people are not with you in spirit. Trainings? We had lots of them, but the core of the thing was that we all worked together well as a team, and we all tried our hardest without lying or creating false names….because nothing we were saying on the phone was a lie. It wasn’t tacky or scummy; we weren’t trying to fool anyone into doing anything. Of course, we also weren’t doing customer support or explaining technical manuals on the phone…but if we had been asked to, we would have managed to do it with a smile. All the callers were well-educated, and worked at the call center part-time or full-time because it supplemented their income, and all of them did it with a genuine feel for people. The term “human capital” would have been absurd.
Tom, the manager, was liked by everyone. He was known to be fair and approachable, and although he was not a softy or a pushover, you could ask him for a special schedule if you needed one. The clients who hired the call center also loved what we did. We had great rankings, and could get anyone to buy anything on the phone. Of course, the company only signed up with companies it genuinely developed a relationship with. And that is the secret of managing and developing any business at all: develop a real relationship by calling your clients and dealing honestly with them.
It was great while it lasted.
Like most things in that time of change, it didn’t last. The call center was bought out in 1994 by a bigger company, and went the way many companies have gone in the U.S. and elsewhere: the management became big and impersonal, giving lip service to the values of human decency and individuality that the smaller company really lived by. And that’s what companies do these days: they have a people-centered company mission statement that sounds good, and then they often do just the opposite in practice. And people know it.
Bigger is not better. Bigger cars take more gas and make the earth poor once more; bigger bombs destroy our future, bigger debates waste our time, bigger egos prevent us from communicating with one another. And if you are not big enough to lose, you are too small to win.
Covering our fears and our lies with impressive company names and more lies will not help the peoples of this world. Using the clever term “human capital” will not make us feel human. Admitting we are all human and then treating us as such, and forging on with a positive attitude, was always the best policy: as George Bernard Shaw put it, “If you can’t get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you’d best teach it to dance.”
What’s the best way to run a call center? How can you run a call center so you get lots of work and can still face yourself in the mirror?
If you’ve been reading this page, I think you have the answer.