| It’s the hesitation, the wary tone and the "yes" that is three-quarters of a syllable too long. That’s when you know the person on the line has figured out who you are and what you want, and they want no part of you or what you are selling. Now it’s a race between a scripted, often stilted sales pitch, and how quickly they can come up with an excuse and hang up.
It’s a race that I lost more often than not plying the trade of a call-centre operator. In fact, if sales are the barometer of success in this race, I didn’t win a single contest between them – the ambushed homeowners – and us – the call-centre agents. I was a dismal failure who quit before I was fired, but not before getting an inside look at what it’s like to try and convince people that what they really want to do on a pleasant evening at home is to sign onto a fabulous new deal to get the Internet delivered to their house. Savings will be had! Pages will be surfed at a rapid rate! Satisfaction awaits! How can they be sure? Well, because that’s what I was told to say.
The story of my stint at ProCall Marketing Inc., a Calgary outbound call centre, is also a small cautionary tale for those of us who are rude and snappish with the people who interrupt our suppers or get us running to the phone only to hear a sales spiel. It’s pretty safe to say that none of the people with whom I worked at Pro-Call wrote down call-centre agent when they were asked what they wanted to be when they grow up. Save one, they were there because of circumstances – just like me.
NOT-SO-EASY MONEY
I ended up at ProCall because I work for the CBC, one of the 5,500 members of the Canadian Media Guild who were locked out in mid-August. The pay I got for the mind-numbing task of picketing the empty building on Westmount Boulevard wasn’t quite the same wage I earn as executive producer for CBC Newsworld’s five Calgary-based programs.
My wife increased the hours she worked, but September is an expensive month. So while my employer and the union bickered over contract jobs, I wanted to supplement the meagre lockout pay. There’s a catch, though. Calgary employers find it hard to fill minimum or near-minimum wage positions, but they aren’t desperate enough to hire someone who will bolt the first chance he gets.
Enter ProCall, where Kate, the project manager, needs about 20 customer service representatives for the Internet sales project, but she can only muster about half a dozen. I had sent my resumé to Kate (like the others in this story, that’s not her real name) a week earlier, and she invited me in to ProCall’s office in Chinatown for an interview.
Kate seemed nervous, and perhaps a bit intimidated. The interview lasted about 15 minutes, and she talked for 12 or 13 of them, telling me the virtues of the job, how much money I could make once I reached sales targets, how easy the package would be to sell. She made it clear that ProCall prides itself on being a cut above other telemarketers. No furnace cleaning pitches for them, and ProCall does have a list of clients that backs up that image. For instance, while I was there, other agents were canvassing for a focus group on behalf of the University of British Columbia.
Kate had one more arrow in her quiver – money. Kate said that with bonuses she had earned $27 an hour as an agent. Of course, without sales you are stuck at $9 an hour. I didn’t expect $27 an hour, but I did expect to get more than the minimum. After all, how hard could it be? I was about to find out.
NOT-SO-HARD SELL
My first night on the job starts slowly. I arrive 10 minutes ahead of the 4 p.m. start time and meet another new agent named Ellen, who, it so happens, is also locked out of her job at Telus. We exchange picket line anecdotes, waiting to get going. I wonder if call-centres are the first or last refuge for those who need to make some cash in labour disputes.
ProCall’s website proclaims that it has "thoroughly trained customer service operators (who) act seamlessly on your behalf." The training consists of a bundle of printed information on the product – Internet packages from a company called 3Web. There are three packages, each one faster and more expensive than the other. There are also two long-distance deals that can bring the Internet costs down, and a special, limited time sign up offer that supposedly is only available over the phone. Some of the information is contradictory, some of it is vague, and all of it seems a bit jumbled and confusing.
The other part of the training package is advice on selling and dealing with customer complaints. You’re urged to listen and respond and acknowledge and clarify – nice mushy words that are designed to keep people on the phone and keep your hopes of a sale alive. There are tips on getting the sale done: listen for the cues to close, one sheet advises, and don’t keep selling once you hear them. Another offers suggestions on how to deal with objections. Turn it back on the caller is one. If someone says they don’t want the hassle of changing an e-mail address, remind her how much money she will save by changing Internet providers.
Then it’s onto the floor, a bland, grey room with too much fluorescent lighting that holds about 30 cubicles with computer monitors and keyboards. It is Dilbert-like in the extreme.
The computer program is dead simple and nearly 30 years old. But for call centres, you don’t need much more than the antiquated program and a headset. The computers dial phone numbers, there’s a beep in the earpiece of the headset, a name pops up on the screen, and you’re on. I keep a close eye on the names, watching for people whom I might know. That will trigger the automatic disconnection.
Being online is important. Basically, call centre agents are only paid for the time they are on the telephone, and their performance is tracked closely. There are statistics on sales, the number of calls and the efficiency rate. Anything less than 90 per cent efficiency – essentially the ratio of calls made to logged-in time – is considered too low, and Kate makes it her job to electronically patrol the team to catch anyone using little tricks like waiting a couple of minutes before disconnecting.
The relentless automatic dialler makes sure that you are either talking to someone or waiting to talk to someone. I yearn for the occasional lapses when the dialler has trouble getting an answer. It’s a 45-second respite to stare over the top of the cubicle at the roof of a nearby building.
We all have a script that we are supposed to use. It starts with your name, and the first thing that you catch onto is that hardly anyone uses surnames. Some even use a fake name; one young woman, who is brazen enough to read the want ads even as she’s making calls, has decided on a name that sounds like a dish from the menu of an Italian restaurant.
The script starts with 3Web’s CRTC challenge of companies like Shaw and Telus, and how it got Internet services deregulated. That leads to the heart of the matter – how homeowners can save money by switching to 3Web. Aside from wondering why anyone should care who went to the CRTC and did what, it’s not that clear-cut. Some Telus users say they are getting the Internet for less than 3Web is offering it. That’s a tough sell. Shaw customers don’t want to have two bills instead of one. They, at least, are polite in their refusal.
Kate wants us to stick to the script. It has been worked out with 3Web, and she needs to figure out whether it is getting the job done. Based on my experience, it isn’t – but that could say more about me than the script.
In the end, making a sale is more about the agent’s ability to schmooze while ignoring the target’s attempts to wiggle out of the call. Some people can be effective at it, particularly Jake. He’s making sale after sale, and I spend part of the second night listening to how he does it.
His first trick seems to be that he assumes whomever he is calling knows who he is and what 3Web is. "Hello – it’s Jake from 3Web . . . Jake . . . you know, 3Web." Then he fires up his own version of the 3Web script. It’s not that he isn’t telling the truth. It’s just that, to Jake, the truth is malleable – so malleable it’s almost a shtick.
"Do you want to help smash the monopolies?" he asks, and if this Lenin in a headset gets some pushback, he steps it up. "So you support the monopolies? You think that’s OK, do you?" It never occurred to me that the revolution would start in a call centre, but maybe it will. Or maybe it’s just a good gimmick. One night he makes six sales. Jake’s headed towards the lucrative bonuses.
Unlike Ellen or me, Jake is at ProCall by choice. He flashes a bank receipt one night that he claims is from his last paycheque. It shows more than $3,000. At another point, he leans back in his chair, puts his feet up on the desk and calls out, "Hey Fred – this is why I like it here. I don’t have to do anything." That may be the attraction, because Jake apparently has a technical degree that could land him something else. His father, at least, thinks so. He keeps applying for jobs for Jake, and sending him out for interviews that Jake manages to sabotage.
Also unlike Ellen or me, Jake is making sale after sale. Ellen frets about it, worries about pressure from Kate and tries to adjust her pitch. I’m just a pushover. If someone even hints at saying no, I abandon the call with a string of apologies: "Sorry to bother you. Thanks for your time. Go back to your supper."
Here, then, is the underlying reason for my failure. The person at the other end of the line and I are talking only because of the whimsy of the dialling program, and I remain acutely aware of that barrier. These calls always come when kids are screaming, the television is blaring or some other thing from a life that is already too busy requires attention. Who needs some stranger yammering about deregulation and Internet deals?
You really can hear it in someone’s voice as they try to shake you off the line. I’m selling Internet, they’re thinking up excuses. "I don’t have a computer," is a pretty good counter to an Internet pitch. Others listen for a bit and then tell you that their partner takes care of all of that, and she’s not home right now. Oddly, the partner always seems to be out. Still others apparently can lose their ability to speak English in the space of a few seconds.
Those excuses, feeble as they may be, are easy to take. It’s the rude ones that stick in my mind. Like the guy who snapped, "Are you calling from an automatic dialler? Are you? Take me off your list right now." Sorry, don’t know how. Or the fellow who kept shouting, "You irritate me! You irritate me! You irritate me!" He might have kept going if I hadn’t disconnected the call. Really, guys (and it was always guys), it’s not worth a coronary.
Not that I haven’t acted the same way in the past when someone has called assuming that what I want, this very instant, is to buy carpet cleaning or a cellphone or a magazine subscription. But it doesn’t take all that huffing and puffing to shake a call centre agent. One of the women working the UBC portfolio told me that ProCall insists on a policy that she calls "Two Nos and Go." It simply means that when you hear the second no, you say goodbye. Nearly everyone, except maybe Jake, abides by it.
Kate, who monitors the calls, senses that I won’t go in for the kill. She coaches me along after listening in on one, telling me where I could have cut in, pushed a little harder. On my third and last night, she comes to my desk, and hesitantly tells me that I seem to be getting a bit better. Then she adds that it’s OK to not make any sales this week, but next week, well, that would be a problem. I take that as a sign.
Next afternoon I bail out of ProCall. I think Kate is relieved, and so am I.
THANKS AND GOODBYE
The day after I left ProCall, I picked up the phone at home. It was a fellow named Raj. The only Raj I know works in the CBC’s Toronto newsroom, and this wasn’t him. Raj wanted to tell me about a fabulous new deal on long distance.
I listened for 15 seconds, and then told him I was happy with our current plan. After another 15 seconds, I told him the same thing. When he kept going, I just said, "You know, I think I’ve said no thank you twice now."
Raj said goodbye right away. |
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