Call Center Employees!

Be prepared to sit down a lot, worked in call centres for years, I found that I hated having conversations on the phone once home, good luck, im sure you will enjoy it:~)

Never have. Good luck with the new job.

i used to train customer service in a call center for a variety of clients from USPS to technical support. i did this for 8 years and have a pretty good idea of what call center life is like.

i could write pages.

but i will leave you with a few things -
as far as the call center itself - if it's a 24/7 place - be flexible with your time/hours. When i started, i was young, single and childless. i could work anytime, even though I preferred a regular shift. Flexibility earned me favor with supervisors and management.

you cannot take angry people personally - one of the reasons call centers have high turnover is that people can be nasty. and some people can't take that. most of the time the customers i handled had a problem/issue. the perfectly happy people just didn't have a reason to call. Some were reasonable from the start, others were not. but, regardless, i was not the source of their frustration. i was there to help them. it was important to me to get the caller to see me as an ally and not an enemy.

words can matter - i have listened to hundreds, if not thousands, of recorded calls. And there are times when calls go bad and a customer leaves angry. most of the time (not all) the representative created, or instigated the bad experience with poor word choice.

most of the calls you take will be nice, normal, friendly people - but people love to tell stories about the mean ones.

is that along the lines of what you are looking for? call centers have always been good to me. I have had a variety of roles in there, and it proved to be a decent career move in the long run. you can either go in everyday and do your job and that's it, or you can - if you want - turn it into a supervisor, manager, trainer role and do more.

I don't work in a Call Center, but from the people who do: most of the time when people are angry, it's not you and it might not even be the situation they're calling about. If you can let them blow off steam and then competently handle what they're calling about, you can end up their best friend.