Working on the phone has a bad reputation. But the reality is very different! For many of those who give it a try, call centres are great places to work and offer great opportunities. So let’s debunk some of the myths surrounding working in a call centre!
It’s all cold calling or customer services. No-one wants to speak to you
While some jobs will involve cold calling, most contact centres are more sophisticated than sitting you down with a list of numbers. There’s nothing to gain from calling hundreds of people who aren’t interested in what you’re selling them. Instead, you’ll be following leads: perhaps dealing with old customers or renewing existing business. Business-to-business telesales are often more about relationship building than cold calling and hard selling.
When receiving inbound calls in a customer service department, most people assume it means spending the day getting abuse down the telephone from irate customers. And while this does happen very occasionally, the vast majority of calls will be smoothly resolved.
Call centres are just for young people with no experience. I want a career.
Working in a call centre isn’t all that different to any other sales role, when it comes to your career prospects. And while many businesses are happy to take on inexperienced staff to man the telephones, others want someone who knows what they’re doing when it comes to communicating and selling: making calls that are about quality, not sheer quantity!
If you’re enthusiastic about it and do well, there’s plenty of room for career growth. Many people who start out on the phones progress to a team leader role and upwards. Of course, the sales and leadership skills you can develop are very transferrable to other sectors. A good telephone manner will always be a desirable thing to have.
There’s no job security: my role will just get outsourced to Asia!
Although many companies do outsource some of their inbound and outbound call centres to places like India and the Philippines, a lot of businesses choose to keep their services closer to home. Most customers prefer to speak to someone in the UK; some accents are preferred for their friendlier tone. UK based call centres offer better customer satisfaction and better sales results so most telephone-based jobs are here to stay. While relocations and redundancies do happen, as they do in every industry, if you can perform well and progress up the career ladder, call centre work can be great for getting into a new role.
Despite the fantastic opportunities they offer for Bright Sparks, working in a call centre has a bad reputation that it doesn’t deserve. Many other industries suffer the same problems when it comes to attracting the right people to their workforce and with call centres it’s usually because the wrong personalities are put into the wrong jobs.
But if you think you might be just the sort of person who will thrive in this sort of environment, consider some of the fantastic opportunities we have available at the moment.
