The other day, a colleague came in to work with a nifty new USB toy. It was essentially a big red button that, when pressed, emitted a ‘WHOOP! WHOOP!” siren and played a nuclear end-of-the-world screensaver on your PC. Looking at this plastic button of doom, sometimes I can’t help but wish that the Mayan calendar is right. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not into the gloom and doom kind of thi

So you got your paycheck – the result of a month’s worth of sleepless nights, anxiety and stress problems, and the daily conscious effort of improving your performance on the floor. It’s a physical proof of your hard work. Now, how are you going to spend it… the right way? Sure, it’s already a given that you’ll use some of it to pay the usual bills (phone, house rent, electricity

Today I will tell you a story of the guh-guh-ghetto-est of all bus lines in Southern California. The Metro Local Line 40 bus goes east to west (and back again) on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. It runs nearly all night through some of the sketchiest, lowest income areas of South Los Angeles, Hawthorne and Culver City. So at 4 in the morning, you’re riding with gangstas, ex-cons, hard working folk, hardly w

While it is the voice that moves products or closes deals for a car loan in call centers, it is not the only thing that is working when someone is on the call center clock. The mind of an agent – particularly a skilled one – is always clicking, always running plans within plans, wheels within wheels. While the common myth is that call center agents are mindless drones, nothing could be further from the truth. F

The year is almost done. The holiday season is the perfect time for you to reflect on the year that was for you as a call center agent. Your sleepless nights (or days), those irate customers you dealt with, and those calls you wish never happened. But it’s not all bad. Of course, there are things worth celebrating. A promotion, maybe, or perhaps a raise or hefty Christmas bonus. It may also be those calls tha

We won’t lie and say working hours are the best times of our day. Think about it: day in and day out, you’re taking calls for 8 hours. That’s a solid one third of your entire day. And the reality is, the remaining two thirds are either spent sleeping, or preparing for work. You’ll be spending the rest of the time travelling back and forth, brushing your teeth, taking a bath, eating breakfast

You vividly remember the day when you got a call from the recruitment officer asking you to report for contract signing. Finally, your efforts have paid off. You went alone and fell in line along with hundreds of aspiring applicants then. You were unsure of what questions were to be asked during the exam, or if you were lucky enough to ace the interview. Your mind was then filled with a lot of questions. The smile

Many companies find themselves wanting to reach out more and expand their businesses. The problem is that most businesses find themselves in the tough financial situations that most of us find ourselves because of the bad economy. Most companies simply don’t know how to go about taking the steps to improve their productivity. This is where call centers come in. Call centers can increase efficiency and revenue to

When you are running a business, there is no doubt that you are going to need a call center. This is a critical piece of the puzzle for any business. The reason is because you have to make sure that you are providing a place where customers can call in with comments or questions about the products that they are purchasing. When they are doing this, you will find that you are gaining insight into how the customers a

A good business with a call center will eventually need to realize that its agents can end up becoming a large component of how well the business does. They are the ones that make “first contact” with the customer and know what the market is like on an individual basis, which can become invaluable information. However, many companies still don’t realize that a very productive call center contributes to a posi