I've not come across anyone clever or helpful in a call centre, I've not worked in one but I've worked behind the scenes on a few stints and the atmosphere at the ones I was at was a real orwellian nightmare, you'd have to be daft or desperate to work there.
Never said it was, just tarring them all with the "daft" brush, giving them decision-making powers isn't a wise move, thankfully whenever they've done something dumb I've been able to move up the chain to get to someone with some wits.
And I have, which perhaps makes my observations slightly more valid.
As I said, some people don't have the choice.
Funny how most people's criticism of call centre staff is that they *aren't* given the power to make meaningful decisions.
Call centres are one of the plagues of modern society, where businesses hide behind an impenetrable mass of technology and procedure to avoid being really accountable to their customers. In a truly free labour market, very few people would choose to work in one. Some call centre staff are knowledgeable, helpful and have the customer's interest at heart. These three statements are not mutually exclusive.
To me that's a blessing, given the hassle I have in getting some of them to grasp what it is I'm trying to do in the first place. An example is my ISP, there's a problem with their radius server that keeps on occuring every now and again that stops my connection coming up, so every few months my connection goes down and someone has to go along and reboot the radius server (they're too lazy to fix it). The call centre monkeys can't grasp any of that and try and go through the script, so you just throw a few googlies at them so they can't cope and you go through to second line. Mentioning that I'm running linux to the first-line lot is a total no-no.
The problem basically is that they're paid peanuts and a result are monkeys, when I was on tech support back in the late 1990s I was paid £40,000 which was a lot back then, but I did develop the services I was being paid to support. We didn't deal with the public, we dealt with companies like Guinness and Lloyds TSB, so we charged a lot of money and they had to get what they were paying for -- proper support.
In today's market for consumer goods the equipment is frequently complicated so there are a lot of people needing help, but to keep the costs down the call centres are staffed with cheap people who basically don't know what they are doing because those who do know wouldn't do the job for the wages. Eventually that happened with my market too and a first and second line of support was developed, the first line thought they knew what they were doing but in reality they were clueless and drove us up the wall with their ham-fisted attempts to do more than they could, and if I'd stayed there we'd have given them scripts to follow and hired people who knew their place.
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