Interesting experience working at the callcentre.
Basically we’re calling people on behalf of the FCA ringing people who’ve taken out payday loans to check if they’re alright and they haven’t been exploited and shit. On the whole, its not bad. It is genuinely a good cause and beats charity callcentring by a mile. There are still targets to achieve and you do still need to persuade people to give up their time (15 minutes or so) and answer a few fairly personal questions, but they do get a £10 amazon voucher at the end of it so its worth doing.
We have to read a sales script off a screen. To a large extent, much of what we have to say is out of our hands and beyond our control.
Now unfortunately, for a lot of the people we ring up, we give them the pitch and then find out they aren’t eligible to do the rest of the survey after all as the last payday loan they took out was actually declined/accepted when its registered on the computer system as the reverse.
Naturally, this leaves the people on the other end of the phone pretty angry that they don’t get their Amazon voucher - and occasionally they become abusive. I and a few of my colleagues have had people shouting down the phone as well as sneering with things like “go and get a better job”, “piss off you minimum wage prick”, “you effing this, that and the other” etc.
Now for me I can obviously take it - and as a (reasonably) compassionate person I can understand their frustration given that they’re obviously in a difficult financial situation - but for a lot of my colleagues for whom this is their full-time work, the barbs hit home a lot more and its seriously unpleasant to have to hear.
The worst thing? All this could be solved if the company would just get their software provider to provide a friggin’ button or drop-down menu to correct things if the person we’re speaking to is noted as declined-when-they-were-actually-accepted or vice-versa, but anyone bringing this up with the bosses is more-or-less told off for not concentrating on their work and (whilst they don’t actually say it), essentially getting ‘ideas above their station’.
Naturally theres a lot of tribalism and bitterness - but much of it is directed back towards the people on the other end of the phone (albeit in conversations amongst the staff). “KMT, I’m not the one gettin’ rejected for a payday loan bruv! /Nah mean fam!” was one conversation I overheard from a few of my colleagues.
Whilst I make no secret of the fact that politically I’m right-wing, I must admit, jumping back into the shit and hearing that sort of conversation does remind me how easy it is for the rich to (as George Carlin put it) get the ‘lower classes’ fighting among themselves while they essentially fuck off with all the money.