Call Center Memories

Megan McArdle has a post on whether it is a problem to have a political class with little experience working outside the Academia-NGO-Government sector. In passing she provides the following anecdote:

At a salon dinner in Washington not long ago, I found myself explaining why so many people go into consulting: it's less exhausting than corporate jobs. One of my friends who went into the management training program at a telecom firm out of business school found himself managing a call center. It's a responsible position, but it's also a little stressful and not always interesting.

"I'm sorry," said one of the other attendees, a very smart and insightful person who writes beautifully and knows a whole lot about economics, "but if you get an MBA from Chicago, and you manage a call center, you're an idiot."

This is pretty much exactly wrong. If you are going to someday be a senior manager at a major telecom firm, you should absolutely manage a call center: nowhere else will you get the kind of hands on experience with the firm's customer base in their most irascible, demanding moments, or learn as much about the company's cost structure and operational challenges. And surely it is not actually idiotic, even for someone with an MBA from a top school, to want to be a senior manager at a major telecom firm?

And yet, it's such an unsurprisng remark, because this so often seems to me to be the animating spirit of our governing class. The purpose of an elite education, the thinking goes, is to equip you to design and run the system by which 300 million Americans live together--and to ensure that you never, ever have to actually interact with the 280 million who did not graduate from an elite academic program.

I'd agree that someone who has aspirations of working high up in a telecom company should have some experience managing a call center, because a call center is, after all, typically the only way that most telecom companies customers ever interact with the company itself. Understanding what that experience is like (and the problems it creates) is doubtless valuable.

That said, having spent a little time working in a call center is more generally a valuable experience in our current economy. I was talking with my uncle about this the other day. He works in a call center which answers initial sales inquiries for health insurers, and has dealt with one kind of telephone work or another for a number of years (he's an independent musician, and so the telephone work provides a flexible "day job".) My own call center experience was much more brief: I spent six months as a team manager at an outbound sales call center while I was finishing up my last semester of college.

I had been taking extra credits all through college and so had a light course load my last year and was working full time. At first I had a fairly fun job at a web hosting company, but after the .com bubble burst and I got laid off, I needed a job that would get me through six months before I moved back to California and got married. Training callers for $10/hr, 50 hours a week was grueling but it was more money than I'd ever made before and I was eager to take the job, even though after a couple weeks I'd have a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach as I drove across the Ohio river into West Virginia to work every day.

Several years later I dealt with call centers a little more distantly, working on a team that was tasked with listening to Indian call centers answer tech support calls and then coaching the tech support reps on how to deal better with American customers.

Dealing with people on the phone for a living is a valuable experience in part because it puts you in the position of dealing with people all day who are, it not actually at their worst, certainly not at their best. When you're taking inbound calls, you're still generally dealing with people who would rather not have to talk to you. They have a problem that has caused them to call up an 800 number, wait on hold, get transferred around, and finally talk to you about some situation they wish they weren't in. Outbound calling is typically even more stressful, since there you're interrupting people who really don't want to talk to you and trying to sell them something.

Through it all, you're required to be as polite and professional as possible. If you lose it, not matter how badly abused you were by the caller, you get fired.

If you don't burn out, you learn a fair amount of self control: both making yourself do a job you don't like and dealing with abuse without retaliating. It also builds a certain empathy for the people you have to deal with when on the phone. It makes the person on the other end of the phone when you have to call your phone company another human being rather than a verbal punching bag on whom to express your frustration with having been transferred too many times. And when you get some sales person calling up, you know that you're dealing with some low wage stiff trying to get through a shift who has heard every snappy comeback about calling him during his dinner before a hundred times.

For the record: When dealing with an outbound sales caller, if you want to get through the call quickly and politely, the thing to understand is their scripts are designed to deal with substantive objections. If you simply say, "No, I'm just not interested," without providing any reason at all, they'll go through their two generic rebuttals and get off the phone. Also be aware: if you tell them "This is not a good time" they'll disposition you as a call back, because that's better for their performance statistics than a refusal. And if you say, "Take me off your list," they are legally required to do so (though that also counts against their stats, so they sometimes will pretend not to hear it and just terminate the call.)

Online Purity vs. Brick and Mortar Messiness

For a majority of my professional life, I worked at a large company that sold consumer electronics online. I did various types of marketing analytics: analyzing sales to determine how to incent salespeople, building models to pick which customers to pitch which products to, then several different jobs setting prices for different types of products. Then, just over a year ago, I left the company to take a job managing pricing for a moderately large chain of quick service restaurants.

There's been a lot to learn moving from electronics to food service -- but the biggest change, given that I deal with data and prices, has been going from working with a company that sold virtually all its products via the web or phone to a company in which sales depend on what's going on at several thousand individual locations scattered all over the country.

For someone who spends his time trying to figure out how to set prices based on sales data, this takes a lot of getting used to. At my previous company, I could put an item on sale and within hours see the sales pick up. The vast internet, and the ease with which people using shopping portals search out the lowest price on expensive purchases like electronics, made it incredibly easy to measure and predict the effect that setting the price of a given product at different levels would have.

Here things are very different. Not only is making a change harder (changing the price of a product involves getting the crews at hundreds or thousands of locations to all make the right change to their menus on the same day, getting them many materials they need to make that change, making sure they have the supply of the featured items to meet increased demand, etc.), but the results are much harder to read. If the results at a couple dozen locations are terrible in response to a promotion, is that because something was "the wrong price", or because there was construction in the neighborhood making that location hard to get to, or because the assistant manager left and things were run badly for a couple weeks while people scrambled to re-organize the team, etc. Not only can it take a lot of extra work to figure out some of these extraneous factors -- because of scale and the ability of the people at each location to explain what they're running into, you never actually know all of them.

It struck me recently that one of the appeals of the online world is that it presents a sort of streamlined mental universe, in which rivers of data flow smoothly and are little interrupted by local particularities. Having been designed by people who think in numbers, the internet is particularly congenial to those who like the world to be quantifiable. I think at times there's a tendency among those of us who try to understand the world via data to make the rest of the world work "more like the internet" simply because the internet is made to work in ways more easily comprehended by out methods -- a bit like preferring fiction to real life because fiction tends to have a comprehensible plot.

When Focus is a Problem

As I've been getting back into the work routine, after the distance which taking two weeks off and watching a new life come into the world provides, one of the things that has been striking me is that my tendency to focus, something I've often prided myself on, is something of a double-edged sword.

On the bright side, when I really make a problem my own, I'm pretty good at gnawing away on it until it's solved -- even if this involves a few sheepish calls home that, "Uh, hon, I said I thought I'd be home by six o'clock, but it's starting to look more like seven to eight." And on small problems, I can usually finish things off pretty quickly and then devote my time to searching around for that illusive, "Something interesting on the net" or writing.

However, when a problem comes along which actually requires waiting on other people to get back to me, rather than just pounding away at things on my own until they're solved to my satisfaction, I tend to either lose focus entirely and move on to something else, or else obsessively check to see if Anyone Is Doing Anything Yet, even when I know this is highly unlikely. And find it very hard to focus on anything else.

The which is not at all a professional virtue, and indeed is at times well neigh crippling if one can't go off and find some detachment very quickly.

The Difficulties of Planned Failure

It's Friday, and so rather than a deep analysis post, you get some brief workplace bitching.

I'm been having a hard time at work the last couple weeks as a result of organizational changes. Our team was reduced by over 50% (though fortunately, no one got laid off, just moved around) while our workload increased, and I'm the only experienced member left on the remainder. As this was being planned out over the last couple months, I told my manager repeatedly that the team would not be able to get everything done if we were reduced so far and left with all inexperience people. "I know," was the response. "But this is what we've been told to do, and we're not going to get another decision until something breaks and people see we can't be reduced this far and still function."

So here we are planning to fail so we can get more resources. And what I've been finding is how incredibly difficult and demoralizing that is for me. For a very long time, I've realized, a lot of my self-identity in regards to work has centered around the fact that although I fool around a bit with blogs and such I'm a very efficient worker and can usually get things done faster than most other people. Plus, if necessary, I'm willing to put in long hours. So if I'm asked to do something and told it's important, it simply gets done.

And yet, here I am facing a situation where if I take my usual approach, put in lots of hours, find better ways to do things, and somehow manage to do all the work on time -- all I'll do is succeed in making the unsustainable workload last longer, perpetuating the problem. Instead, I'm supposed to give it a try in such a way that I can claim that I have truly done my best and not wasted time, and yet fail to deliver the work that I've been asked to complete and on time, in the hope that bad things will happen and we'll be given more resources as a result. (This made harder by the fact that I'll be the one, as lead on these processes, taking most of the brunt of the initial displeasure at things not working out -- not the manager who's directed me to fail.)

If this were a matter of standing up to management and making the case that I need more resources on our team in order to get things done -- it would be pretty easy for me. But I already tried that, and the result was the direct to let things break. I don't know if I'm pleased to find how central to my sense of identity in regards to work "I get things done and don't fail" is, but now I know, and I guess I'm going to have to either disengage from it or spend a pretty miserable couple weeks/months.

Overwork in the Age of Multi-tasking

The weekend's WSJ had an interesting article about work hours -- the hours that people think they work, and the hours they actually do.

Over the past two decades of rapid technological deployment and globalization, it has become an article of faith among the professional set that we work sweatshop hours. Sociologist Juliet Schor started the rumor with her 1992 book, "The Overworked American," which featured horror stories of people checking their watches to know what day it was.

Then God created the BlackBerry and things got worse. In late 2005, Fortune's Jody Miller claimed that "the 60-hour weeks once thought to be the path to glory are now practically considered part-time." In late 2006, the Harvard Business Review followed up with an article on "the dangerous allure of the 70-hour workweek," calling jobs that required such labor the new standard for professionals. The authors featured one "Sudhir," a financial analyst who claimed to work 90-hour weeks during summertime, his "light" season. He's got nothing on a young man I met at a party recently who told me he was working 190 hours a week to launch his new company.

It was a curious declaration; I would certainly invest in a start-up that had invented a way to augment the 168 hours that a week actually contains. The young man turned out to be kidding. But he felt overworked, and so he indulged in some workweek inflation. Research shows that this is a common affliction among anyone claiming to work more than 50 hours a week. Indeed, almost no one claiming to work 70-, 80- or 190-hour weeks is actually doing so. This doesn't make Summer Fridays any less sweet. But it does raise the question of why our perceptions of work are so different from the reality.

Sociologists have been studying how Americans spend their time for decades. One camp favors a simple approach: if you want to know how many hours someone works, sleeps or vacuums, you ask him. Another camp sees a flaw in this method: People lie. We may not do so maliciously, but it's tough to remember our exact workweek or average time spent dishwashing, and in the absence of concrete memories, we're prone to lie in ways that don't disappear into the randomness of thousands of answers. They actually skew results.

That's the theory behind the American Time Use Survey, conducted annually by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The ATUS, like a handful of previous academic surveys, is a "time diary" study. For these studies, researchers either walk respondents through the previous day, asking them what they did next and reminding them of the realities of time and physics, or in some cases giving them a diary to record the next day or week.

...Back in the 1990s, using 1985 data, researchers John Robinson and his colleagues compared people's estimated workweeks with time-diary hours. They found that, on average, people claiming to work 40 to 44 hours per week were working 36.2 hours -- not far off. But then, as estimated work hours rose, reality and perception diverged more sharply. You can guess in which direction. Those claiming to work 60- to 64-hour weeks actually averaged 44.2 hours. Those claiming 65- to 74-hour workweeks logged 52.8 hours, and those claiming workweeks of 75 hours or more worked, on average, 54.9 hours. I contacted Prof. Robinson recently to ask for an update. His 2006-07 comparisons were tighter -- but, still, people claiming to work 60 to 69 hours per week clocked, on average, 52.6 hours, while those claiming 70-, 80-hour or greater weeks logged 58.8. As Mr. Robinson and co-author Geoffrey Godbey wrote in their 1997 book "Time for Life," "only rare individuals put in more than a 55-60 hour workweek."
...
There are many reasons for such discrepancies. The first is the gray definition of much white-collar labor. If you're watching "Talladega Nights" on a flight to a conference, are you working? Is reading the Taste page of The Wall Street Journal in your office work? Anyone claiming an 80-hour workweek is definitely putting both in the "yes" category -- though this mode of calculation is going to result in more generous estimates than an observer might tally.

The second reason people overestimate is that they discount exceptions that don't fit the mental pictures they create of themselves. If you work four 14-hour days, then quit after 8 hours on Fridays, you'd think a "usual" day was 14 hours, meaning that you work 70-hour weeks. But you don't. You work 64 -- maybe. ... You might have worked on weekends. But here we tend to overestimate time devoted to small, repetitive tasks. People think they spend far more time washing dishes than they do. Likewise, if you pulled out your BlackBerry 10 times over the weekend, you might give yourself credit for several hours of work, even though each incidence took five minutes. Total time? Less than one hour, even though you feel as if you're in work mode 24/7.

I think it's particularly appropriate that I'm posting these excerpts between meetings at work. An element of this overestimation which the author touches on above with the reverence to reading the taste page at work is that the modern professional work environment often makes it much easier to intersperse work and leisure in a nearly seamless fashion.

The same technology which makes it easy for me to answer questions from fellow employees in India at 11PM also makes it easy for me to pop up a web browser when my computer is taking to long to run a complex query and read an article from First Things, or to type out a blog post in the fifteen minute chunk of time I have before going to a meeting. As well as making our work more efficient, computers also give us more chances to recreate while we're working. So even in a week when I may spend 60 hours in the office building (something which is blessedly rare these days) I may well have spent five or even ten of those hours reading, going to lunch, talking to MrsDarwin on the phone and so on. "Flex time" gives us much craved freedom, while at the same time putting larger swaths of time overall in the "work" bucket.

Whether this is good or bad is probably mainly a matter of temperment. I'm probably happier with this kind of mix than I would be doing concentrated work on a factory line for seven hours a day with two half hour breaks. Others, I'm sure, would rather work intensively from 6AM to 2PM and be done.