Call centres- anyone worked in them in the 80's/90's?

[Electerrific 14]

Did anyone ever work in a call centre during the 80's or 90's?

 

Were the rules more 'relaxed' than now, ie. Data Protection and call quality, etc?

 

What relating to the workday was different than now (system technology aside)? Call volumes, etc?

[spilldig 190]

My son worked in a call centre for a couple of years in the 90s. He said it was awful , mainly because they were told to only deal with one problem at a time and were therefore getting complaints from customers that they were ignorant and abrupt. He says it has improved from what he is told by someone still working in a call centre.

Edited October 30, 2018 by spilldig

[smithy266 21]

The daughter of a friend needed a job, and worked for one...she didnt like the job at all. Ever since, when I get a junk call I consider the person who is phoning me equally hates their job, and does it for the need to earn, so I am never rude or abusive to them, but always polite. It could just be the needy son or daughter of someone just like you.

[tlangdon12 13]

I don't think it has changed much since the late 90s. I ran the IT infrastructure for a 100 seat call centre doing blended inbound and outbound calls in '98-2000. Certainly the data protection requirements were less, but the call quality, voice recording and metrics around call quality were all in place. There was certainly a great pressure to reduce wait times and to sell.

[truman 10]

I have installed lots of large (500 seat+) call centres..all the stats re time on call,no. of calls lost ,agent available time,time in wrap etc were all there.. we used a system whereby all the keystrokes an operator input were recorded as well so,in case of any dispute the whole session could be replayed just in case the agent said one thing and accidentally keyed in another..all very interesting but I wouldn't have fancied actually working as an agent...

[tinfoilhat 11]

The "call centre" I worked at in the early 90s had none of that technological nonsense. We had a yellow pages and a felt tip pen!

[blake 10]

I worked at a call center like that too once, but it was more advanced than that. We had TWO felt tip pens. A red one and a blue one

 

the managers were far more advanced than us, and they had three felt tip pens - although they tried to hide the third felt tip pen they had, which was black, it was obvious that they had it.

[steve68 66]

I once had an unfortunate task of sitting in on a customer service call centre in the 90s for the day to see how it worked, back then I couldn't imagine a worse job, toilet breaks were monitored to the second and they had to complete 18 months in the job, before being able to apply for other roles within that company.