Working in a Call Center: What You Need to Know Before Starting

Call Centers: Types and Responsibilities

A call center is traditionally a location from which customer service or sales staff answer phones to help customers solve their problems with a product or service. This might include everything from technical difficulties to billing issues.

But modern call centers are much more than that. There are now five main types.

Types of Call Centers

Many call centers will now be a mixture of some or all of the following:

• Inbound: Receives calls from customers, and manages customer queries. Calls are usually from existing customers calling with technical questions, orders, feedback, and billing issues.
  
• Outbound: A marketing or selling agency that calls (or otherwise communicates) with customers to sell to new prospects, upsell existing clients, gain feedback, or do research.
  
• Virtual: A virtual call center (VCC) refers to customer service software, where the “center” is in the cloud, and coworkers and callers are connected online, from anywhere.
  
• Automated: This is where no human agents are involved, and routine customer queries are answered by an automated voice, chatbot, or intelligent help page.
  
• Omni-channel: A customer service set-up that enables voice and text communication with customers via many channels, including phone call, chat, SMS, and social media.

Call Center Responsibilities

Your typical responsibilities when working in a call center will usually include one or some of the following:

• Handling customer inquiries: Helping customers or clients with questions or issues. These can vary from simple issues resolved with a quick call, text, or canned response, to complex problems requiring an expert agent.

• Providing support and resolving issues: Most of the time, customers will only contact a representative if they have a problem. A good call center agent will understand this, and give callers a good customer experience by talking them through solutions professionally.

• Meeting performance metrics (e.g., call handling time, customer satisfaction): Call center staff will typically be expected to hit certain KPIs or metrics, including resolving an ideal number of issues, handling calls within a certain timeframe, or making a set number of sales.

Call Center Job Descriptions

Working in a call center goes way beyond simply answering a phone or headset. In fact, being successful in a customer support role requires serious organization, team building, and quality control. 

While we’re specifically covering direct-contact agent work in this article, here are some of the main roles you may find in a typical call center: 

What Skills Do You Need To Work in a Call Center?

Working in a call center helps you develop crucial skills and transferable experience that are beneficial throughout your career. 

1. Communication

Good communication in a call center involves effectively sharing information and ensuring clear interactions between agents, customers, and team members. It requires active listening, a good Talk/Listen Ratio, and professional responses to address customer needs.

Effective communication goes far; one Salesforce study found that 88% of customers are likely to re-purchase and 75% are even willing to overlook company mistakes if they receive excellent customer service.

2. Flexibility 

By this we mean emotional flexibility, or responding appropriately— rather than knee-jerk reacting—to different situations. This is especially important in a call center setting when you aren’t sure what the next call or message will bring. 

You can improve call center performance by learning how to get comfortable with uncertainty, staying curious, and trusting your ability to adapt to and deal with whatever comes your way.

3. Empathy

Empathy means understanding someone else’s feelings and sharing their concerns. It means being with the person on their level, ensuring they feel listened to and responded to without being patronized. 

In a call center, this means showing sensitivity to the customer’s feelings, making them feel valued, acknowledging their issues, and confirming understanding before responding. Empathy also significantly distinguishes humans from chatbots; a study found that 99% of customers feel more comfortable with a human helping them resolve their issues.

4. Multitasking

The ability to do more than one task at a time is paramount when working in a call center. You’ll need to listen to, empathize with, and synthesize communication with customers.

Meanwhile, you’ll also be taking notes, looking up records, figuring out the right answer or technical response, and monitoring call center metrics on a real-time dashboard. Focusing on both will boost your productivity and enable you to help more customers, more effectively.

5. Problem-Solving Under Pressure

With calls and messages coming at you non-stop and dealing with customer problems one after the next, you’ll need to be good at staying cool under pressure for optimum call center results.

Whether it’s managing customers, technical information, staff, or metrics; staying calm and focused under stress will give you a competitive edge over those who panic when things get busy.

6. Organization Skills

With all that pressure, multitasking, and a need to remain cool and communicative under stress, staying organized will make your call center work much easier. 

This might include keeping your computer files named consistently and arranged in easy-to-find digital folders, or integrating with a powerful CRM. This means you can pull up records and help files quickly when speaking to a customer on the phone or online chat—helping you stay focused and calm in all situations.

7. Knowledge Retention

Customers usually reach out because they expect a higher level of expertise and knowledge than they can find elsewhere. Many will have done extensive online research without finding the answers they need before calling.

Now, they’re turning to you for solutions (research shows that 80% of customers expect support agents to help them with everything they need). Retaining key knowledge about your service, product, and the customer’s issue is crucial to meeting their expectations, so you can solve their problem and show professionalism.

Pro tip: CloudTalk can help with knowledge recall, and save you the stress of remembering hundreds of customer details. Features like Customer Details, Call Notes, Contact Tags, and User Management (along with CRM integrations) let you catalog and access all customer details and any important information about their file or issue before, during, or after the call. So you always have all the info you need, fast.

Pros and Cons of Working in a Call Center 

A call center role could be exactly what you need, but it’s not always sunshine and rainbows. In fact, it makes sense to be prepared—not only for the positive experiences but also for some of the downsides you might encounter. This way, you can rise to any challenges that come your way.

Pros and cons include:

Pros of Working in a Call Center

Working in a call center can offer some serious advantages you may not get in other roles at a similar job or stage in your career.

Developing Useful Skills

The skills you learn in a call center are useful for any type of career, including rising through the ranks in your call center role. Good communication and empathy, flexibility, organization, multitasking, and working under pressure are major life skills that will serve you at work and at home.   

Competitive Compensation and Benefits

The ideal call center role will offer you competitive pay and benefits. This can incentivize you to hit your targets and metrics and keep improving in the role. The best call center jobs will give you the training and compensation you need to do your job as well as possible.     

Working From Home

With the increasing rise of virtual call centers and software like CloudTalk that lets staff work from anywhere, many roles can now be remote. This means you can enjoy more flexibility and comfort, and it’s easier for those who might struggle with commuting—whether due to disabilities, location, lack of transportation, or personal responsibilities like caring for family.

People-Facing

Even if you prefer working from home, you’ll still connect with plenty of different people throughout your day. With tools like Call Analytics and Sentiment Analysis, you’ll get better insights into what clients and customers need. If you’re someone who enjoys communicating and solving problems, you’ll likely find this part of the job rewarding, whether you’re interacting with colleagues or customers.

Job Security

If you’re dedicated and build the right skills, working in a call center can offer solid job security. As you gain experience, you’ll have opportunities to advance from a new agent to higher positions, like manager or director. Plus, the skills you develop are transferable, so you’ll have good prospects for finding work in the future.

Cons of Working in a Call Center

Some possible stumbling blocks to bear in mind include:

Unpredictable Hours

You may need to work unusual or antisocial hours in your call center role. This might be because the majority of your customers are in a different timezone, or because the company provides 24/7 support. Depending on schedule and staff availability, and your workplace’s level of call center automation, your hours could change at short notice.   

Stress 

Even if you have excellent communication skills, you may find it stressful dealing with multiple calls, especially if they come in relentlessly. There’s always a line of people waiting, and most customers are only calling with a problem. This can add a welcome challenge to the role, but it can easily become stressful (one Cornell University study found that 87% of contact center agents said their job causes stress).

High Turnover Rates

This level of stress can lead to “high churn”, meaning existing staff often leave and new hires start frequently. In fact, one study showed that call centers have an annual attrition rate of 50-60% on average.

Some people might work in a call center as a stepping stone for other work, or because they need a short-term role to make extra income. This can make it harder to create strong links or foster a real feeling of community at work because people are always coming and going. 

Tips for Call Center Success

If you want to avoid falling victim to some of these ‘cons’, and have a successful, satisfying time in your role, these tips could help you thrive.

Develop Strong Communication Skills

• Role-playing and practice sessions: With your co-workers, test each other with commonly-asked questions or difficult example calls and run through scenarios and ways you could respond. This will help you perform better under the pressure of the real thing.
  
• Seeking feedback and continuous improvement: Many call center tools automatically bake feedback into their operations, but if not (and even if they do), it’s crucial to continually evaluate any feedback and results, and work to improve. Ask your manager for tips, or set goals together by analyzing data from your Call Monitoring tool. 

It can be easy to overlook the importance of good communication or think your skills will improve naturally, just from talking to people all day. And yet, you can actively improve it with some key steps:

Are You Ready To Start a Call Center Career?

Far from the ‘dreary’ stereotype it might suggest, working in a call center can be fulfilling, flexible employment. It offers useful and transferable skills, competitive pay and benefits, communication opportunities, and job security.

Yet, It may also require you to work unusual hours and deal with the stress and challenges of a high-pressure role. Skills like great communication, empathy, positivity, calmness under pressure, strong organization, proactivity, and a good head for technical details will get you far.

Plus, familiarizing yourself with popular tools and features common in a modern call center—such as those offered by platforms like CloudTalk—is one way to ensure you start with success, and impress managers right from day one.

Learn your Call Queuing from your Callback, and your Analytics from your Automation…and watch your call center career take off.