phone.
The key thing, Claire explains, is: ‘You have to take control of the call. A lot of customers go mad if you don’t know what you’re doing, and the calls escalate [have to be referred to the supervisor], so you have to be confident all the time. Some customers can be very patronising, and if you don’t seem like you know what you’re doing, the call will escalate.’
On Claire’s computer screen, a series of little squares indicate if there are calls waiting, as well as telling her how long she has been on her current call; she usually has no more than eight seconds between calls. If a call has been difficult, there are only eight seconds in which to take a deep breath and compose her voice into the expected tone of friendliness. All the time she’s managing her emotional demeanour, she’s flicking through a wide range of information on the screen, which she uses to answer customer queries. Later, the head of Claire’s section, experienced in call-centre work, acknowledges that it has become much more technically complex than it used to be. It looks very hard work to me, yet Claire much prefers it to working in a shop, her previous job: ‘I don’t mind talking, I could talk all day. Usually I can cut off after a call, I’m very easy-going. But a really complicated call is sometimes still going through my head.’
The system is down for several hours that afternoon. What is striking is how on the one hand Claire is dealing with very rigid systems set down by company procedure and the vagaries of the computer system, while on the other she is expected to convey a sense of naturalness and her own personality. It’s a tricky combination, and she is frequently apologising for things which are beyond her control. No matter how many times she repeats exactly the same response, she must make it sound ‘warm’, ‘sincere’ and ‘natural’.
Tom is twenty-four, and has been a customer service representative (CSR) here for two years, which counts as experienced in an industry plagued by high turnover. While I listen in, he answers the call of an elderly gentleman who isn’t sure how to explain what the problem is with his mobile phone. He meanders and frequently goes off on long explanations which appear to have little to do with his query. Tom gently coaxes him back to the point and tries to intuit what he really wants from him. It’s not an easy task, and it requires considerable patience – which Tom seems to have in abundance. His easy manner doesn’t falter for a moment, and gradually he manages to establish what he can do to help. As he talks, he’s flicking through computer screens, bringing up the customer’s account details and information about the products he needs.
All the while, there’s a ticker board above the CSRs’ heads showing the number of calls waiting to be answered. They are distributed by the ACD – automatic call distributor – a computerised telephone-handling system which identifies the CSR who has been waiting longest and sends the call to his or her workstation. In most call centres, calls are expected to be dealt with in a specified period of time, although Orange is unusually relaxed on this, believing that too tight a target compromises quality. In other call centres, operators are reprimanded for not meeting the target call duration.
John, another CSR, spends seventeen minutes on one of his calls, advising a customer with great patience and enthusiasm on which mobile phone to buy. Again and again the customer asks questions, and John seems to relish the opportunity to dig out the tiniest detail on the potential purchase. Without a pause, another customer comes through with a complicated enquiry which John also goes out of his way to help answer, only to find that the line has gone dead after he puts her on hold. He calls her back in case she got cut off, but she doesn’t answer her phone. He shrugs it off – he’d been trying to save her money.
Do the customers ever bother him, I ask. He smiles, then admits, ‘The customer wants the moon on a stick…they treat you like a work monkey.’ It’s as if he’s not supposed to say things like that, but having said it, it comes out with real passion. ‘Customers don’t treat you like you’re a human being. [But] if you see things from their point of view it’s easier, and I’m better than I used to be. You need resilience, but I do get worked up. I do raise my voice.’
While John admitted that he sometimes gets upset, Claire seemed at some fundamental level disengaged from what she was doing. There was something robotic about her level of fluency as she switched back and forth between talking to me and answering the phone. What makes the job so demanding is that this intensity of emotional labour goes on for several hours, with little let-up. What the call-centre manager wants is a steady stream of work, and technology, in the form of the ACD system, offers them the possibility of achieving that.
The level of monitoring in a call centre is intense. Alison, the head of a ‘community’ of teams (about two hundred CSRs) at Orange, can see with a glance at her computer screen what everyone is doing. A CSR’s name flashes into red the second he or she is late back from a break. Everything is monitored: the length of calls, the time spent on ‘off-call work’ and the number of calls put on hold. All the figures are collated and sent back to CSRs – those that fall below the targets are highlighted as ‘NI’(needs improvement), while those which exceed the target are ‘HE’ (highly effective). Every second of their time is accounted for.
There are sweatshop call centres where the profit margins are so tight that operators are under continual pressure to meet tight deadlines, forced to stick to strictly scripted interactions, and yet still to manage some cheerfulness and good humour. What all call centres drill into their employees is to ‘speak as if you are smiling’, and ‘as if you have been waiting for this particular call’. This is a job where you’re not allowed an off day – or even an off moment. If a customer is difficult or rude, the call handler must not respond aggressively. He or she certainly can’t betray any irritation or frustration during the next call which is instantly routed through to them. While call handlers are expected to provide the customer with a certain pleasurable emotional exchange, they must also continually repress their own emotions to ensure a standardised service. The equation of providing empathy to another while denying it to oneself is complex. A five-minute call to a call centre represents a profoundly unbalanced human relationship. It is an interaction in which the possibility of reciprocity has been shrunk – by technology and the tyranny of efficient time-use – to the smallest possible component, perhaps no more than a ‘thank you’.
Empathy has become big business, according to consultants Harding & Yorke, who specialise in what they describe as an ‘empathy audit’. They claim to be able to measure every aspect of the emotional interaction between customer and company. If a company wants its employees to sound warmer or more natural, they turn to the likes of Bob Hughes at Harding & Yorke.
I’m intrigued by the idea that something as subjective and spontaneous as human communication can be measured so minutely and then prescribed for employees, and Hughes offers to explain why his company has been called in by the likes of Toyota, Standard Life and Vodafone. He has snippets of recorded call-handler interactions which he plays on his laptop. In one, the handler is confused and uncertain, and the customer ends up hanging up. That could cost the company a customer, points out Hughes, adding that customer loyalty is the biggest predictor of profitability. Delight your customers and they’ll be back; empathy makes money, he argues.
The taped clips are the kind of raw material which Harding & Yorke analyse; they put as many as five hundred questions to the call-centre client about every aspect of the call handler. The client is asked to analyse exhaustively their own emotional response to each part of the interaction, answering questions such as: How much confidence did the call handler inspire in me? How personalised does their language feel? How sincere are they, or did they sound perfunctory? How well did I feel they were listening to me? On the basis of the answers to these questions the call handler is given a score.
Quality emotional interactions are the hardest things to short-circuit, claims Hughes. People are extraordinarily sensitive at recognising emotional cues, so ‘Sincerity is a big thing for us,’ he adds, claiming, ‘If one person has been told
