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Hey everyone. Im 18 years old and just graduated high school. I will be attending university in September but for the summer I am looking for a job. I currently live in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario where there are 5 call centres I believe. The reason why I am considering working at a call centre is because generally these places pay $2-3 more an hour than fast food restaurants, grocery stores, etc.
My mother has talked to a couple people who previously worked in these places and they all said with my background I would get hired without a problem. Anyway, Im wondering if anyone on this forum has experience in this field of work? Is it a stressful job? would you recommend it to a student? Any help and advice is greatly appreciated!
I use to work for a call center. I am not canadian and live in the states. I know in the evening hours our calls were transferred to call centers in St Catherines, Ontario. The staff in Ontario seemed alot nicer than the ones I had to deal with here in the states. I don't know if call centers are operated differently in Canada than the states so my opinion of them may be different than a Canadians. Also I worked for a large US Insurance company called Geico and its main objective was sell sell and more selling, so it was very stressful. Not all call centers are selling something so the stress can change from place to place. It is call after call obviously, and that means being on your best behavior at all times with customers. The worst part I found was being secretly monitored by supervisors listening to the calls employees receive. This was their way of scoring your perfomance, seemed there was always a performance appraisal conducted. Every second you were on the phone had to be accounted for. If you had to go the rest room, you about broke your neck getting there and back to the phone for fear of your performance time being affected. It was not an environment I would recommend to everyone, but for a young person like you, give it a shot. It pays what you need and your not going to be there the rest of your life, you will find a better job as you get older. Its a fill in so to speak ,and its a job for the time being until you find what you want to do in life.
I do have experience in call centre. The main thing you should have or you have to develop is patience while you work, lot of people will ********* if you dont speak well. You have to enjoy your work so that you can survive in call centre.
Last edited by Cornerguy1; 11-25-2009 at 06:38 PM..
I worked at front desk customer service for quite some time. People would bring their problems, and you had to offer a solution, even if the company's policies was to spend the least money and employee hours on attending to customer complaints.
If the job give you the money you need, and that is a temporary gig until you get to college, that's obviously a good thing. My concern is that, someone so young that has to put up with all the ******* customers may put you through, may develop a series of negative feeling that may pop up in the future when you may have to deal with customers in your professional life. It would be better to work in a place where you offer customers a service (even if that is selling food), they get what they need, and they are happy about it. Instead, a call center is a place where customers call you because they have a problem (and they may already be in an awful mood), or where you have to call customers to offer them a service they may have no interest in (and that may put them in an awful mood).
My advice would be, take the call center job with a grain of salt, be ready to not be rewarded or ackowledged for all the little nice things you do for your customers, and be ready to be frustrated by the fact that, no matter how nice and helpful you are all the timme, you only need that one PO'd customer who talked to your supervisor to make your whole experience a very bitter, sour one. If you find yourself on a weekend wondering why things are the way they are at work, then the job is affecting your life too much, and it's time to move on.
I'm not canadian but I've work in Call centres. It's true that you'll earn good money but I found it pretty hectic, and lot of pressure. I don't really want to go to call centre again. BUT I know LOT of people who just like it, they like the challenge it brings and enjoying coffee during break so yep, it really depends on you.
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