In a classroom on the second floor of the JetBlue Airways customer service headquarters in Salt Lake City, thirty-five agents sit at rows of tables listening as Kristal Anderson, a teacher from the company’s training branch, JetBlue University, presides over a PowerPoint presentation. All of the agents have been answering reservation lines at JetBlue for at least a year, and some for more than seven years. Today’s discussion is about dealing with angry customers—or “irates,” as they are often referred to in call centers.
A slide of possible responses to irate customers comes up on the large screen beside Anderson. She asks one of the agents to “read this for us, nice and loud.” The young woman recites the list:
“You’re stupid.”
“I’m not going to help you.”
“I don’t care what you are saying.”
“Please shut up.”
“You are lying.”
There are smiles and giggles. Anderson steps in. “Wouldn’t you agree that these things are probably not very helpful if we said them to our customers?” Everyone nods.
These customer service agents usually answer phones from their homes, but about once a month they trek into the call center for team meetings like this one, part of what the company calls continuous training. A potluck lunch buffet of sandwiches, pasta salads, and a variety of desserts—mostly chocolate—is spread out along tables in the back of the room. There are only two male agents in the room, and two infants who accompanied their mothers to this meeting.
Referring to the slide with the nasty responses, Anderson reassures the agents: “I want you to know, we are very comfortable and confident that you guys don’t say these things. You don’t use these words. Because common sense says that is not very nice.” She goes on. “However, look at this sentence: ‘You were told to be at the airport at least ninety minutes before departure.’ Have we ever said that?” A few people smile in recognition. “Never. Not us. Right?” There is a bit more laughter. Anderson continues: “When someone says, ‘You were told to be there ninety minutes before departure,’ you can almost hear them saying, ‘dumb, dumb,’ or ‘duh.’ Right?”
Even if an agent doesn’t intend it, Anderson points out, what customers hear in that sentence is, “Someone at JetBlue is calling me stupid.” And that, she says, cues customers to fight back. “They start to hear less that you’re a human being. They don’t even see you as a human being on the other end of the phone. You’re a mean person, speaking for JetBlue, who has just called them stupid.”
Anderson goes to the next slide, which presents a popular and longstanding psychological theory that 55 percent of what people communicate is conveyed through body language and 45 percent by tone of voice, inflections, and the content of what is said. So she points out that according to the theory, even the most effective phone communication misses more than half of how we communicate in person. “They don’t get to see if we’re smiling at them, or winking. They can only simply concentrate on our words and how we say them.” During the rest of the session, Anderson encourages agents to think hard about the 45 percent they can use on the phone. She brings up more examples of how, without meaning to, they could convey the rude messages from the beginning of her presentation.
She asks an agent how she might feel if a customer service agent said to her, “I can’t do that.” The agent replies: “Like I’ve run into a brick wall.” Another agent adds: “I’ve had my customers say, ‘You mean you won’t do that? Let me talk to your supervisor.’” Anderson agrees. “It comes across like we’re unwilling; we’re not going to do it. Right? What about, ‘You have to?’ How does that make you feel?” Another agent responds: “I feel like I’m a little kid.” Anderson nods. “Nobody likes to be told what to do. And as grown-ups, we dislike it even more. We want to make sure we are respected as human beings and as contributing people in our communities. So don’t tell me I have to do anything.”
As a matter of course, airlines do tell passengers to check in at the airport ninety minutes before their flights. They do remind them to bring ID to get through security. “Those are true statements. They are a necessity for travel. But when you tell customers, ‘You have to,’ it comes across as negative.” Anderson then asks how to restate a sentence such as, “You were told to be at the airport at least ninety minutes before departure,” so that it sounds “a little bit nicer, more like we’re trying to help.”
One agent recounts what worked for her in the past. “I’ve said, ‘I’m sorry. I know that it’s really hard to listen to someone droning on, recapping your flight and telling you the rules. Maybe you didn’t hear that. But it’s possible that maybe the reservations agent didn’t do that for you. And I am sorry.” Customers responded by saying they didn’t want to get anyone in trouble.
Anderson is pleased with that example. “Empathizing goes a long way. Remember that when they’re upset at us, we are not a human being anymore. They couldn’t care less about us, and they think we couldn’t care less about them. We’re just a voice. And then we become two people who are just trying to find out who’s right and who’s wrong. But when you see someone as a fellow human being, it puts things in perspective.”
She goes to another agent response that irritates customers, especially after weather delays in the airline industry: “This is not JetBlue’s fault.” The agents agree that statement could convey the message: “It’s not my problem,” or “We really don’t care.” Anderson uses the example of a family on their way to Disney World. “They’ve been planning this for months. The dad has had to switch the dates three times because he couldn’t get enough time off. The mom has had to find everybody to take care of the dog and all that. They’ve got everything ready. The kids are stoked. They went to the Disney store and got things on discount so they could wear the cute stuff and save money.” Then they get to the airport and find out the flight is cancelled because of weather.
“So for a minute that person is not thinking about safety. They’re thinking about their little kids looking at them and saying, ‘Gosh, Mom, I can’t believe we can’t go to Disney World.’ When someone is that emotional, they’re mad. Think about it. It doesn’t matter whose fault it is.” Again, she encourages empathy first.
Next Anderson does some empathizing of her own—with the agents. “One of our challenges is we can become callous when we hear the same thing over and over again. Somebody’s sad story becomes just another story. We’ve got to be careful, you guys. Because we might have heard that sob story or that person’s problem a lot in the last twenty or thirty calls. But this is that person’s one time—their only time to call with it. So it’s hard, and challenging. The longer we’re here, the more we need to keep that in the front of our minds. We don’t want to come across like we don’t care.”
She moves on to another unhelpful response. “What about this one: ‘Ma’am, I’ve listened to you; now it’s your turn to listen to me.’ Or ‘Sir, if you’ll just let me talk.’” Everyone sees how both sentences sound as if they are telling the customer to shut up. Then one agent talks about the need to let angry customers blow off steam, which prompts Anderson to compare an angry customer to a wind-up toy that will go and go. Even if it is picked up and it stops, when it is put down again, it will go on and on until it runs itself out. Anderson reminds the agents: “It does not matter how right we are, what perfect answers we know, or how much we want to help them. The bottom line is that somebody has something to say. And if they just go on and on, we’ve found that it is more beneficial to let them finish. Then you can say, ‘Thank you so much. Let me make sure that I’ve understood what you said.’ First of all, you’ve let them run out of juice, so to speak. Then you’re turning the conversation from the person telling you everything to asking them to listen to what you have to say. And most people will listen. Because they want to make sure you understood them.”
One agent brings up the issue of using “sir” and “ma’am,” saying she thinks those terms sound rude and distancing, conveying the message, “I don’t know you. I don’t care about you.” The agent says she prefers to call customers by their last name. Anderson agrees and says using a person’s name is “an important validation. It says, I’m listening to the conversation. I am engaged with what you are saying, Mr. Jones. I’ve paid enough attention to know who you are.”
They go over another sentence agents might use when customers ask for a change that carries a fee they aren’t prepared to pay. If an agent responds by saying, “You clicked on the fare rules when you booked on the Internet,” everyone agrees that is tantamount to calling the customer a liar. They note that in such a situation, the use of the word you can come across badly. Anderson says, “It’s like someone’s finger-pointing at the person. ‘You clicked on the fare rules when you booked online, you idiot.’ That’s not the message we want to come across, right?”
All people, she says, want to save face. “We don’t want to be embarrassed as adults. Even if we messed up.” Maintaining dignity is one right that people don’t readily relinquish. Anderson suggests the agents try to “take the personal out of it and focus on the process. ‘Our process requires that a box accepting fare rules be checked before the system can generate a confirmation number.’ That way, it’s no longer about who did what. It becomes about our process.”
Finally, she asks the agents how many of them have been irate customers in their personal dealings with customer service agents at other companies. Everybody raises a hand—even Anderson. “I’ve called up and gone off the hook. I have just totally let them have it, and been a really mean person on the phone before. Now, I’m a reasonable, rational individual. I have a gigantic heart. I don’t want to hurt somebody. But at the time I was just mad about the process, about the service. I’m not mad at that person, but boy did they get an earful.”
Anderson ends her presentation by pointing out that “customer service is not always about doing exactly what the customer wants. Customer service is just doing your very best and helping people within your abilities. It’s all about delivering the right message to customers and helping them understand why.”
On the wall in Tom and Marlene Goudie’s home office, a few inches above the photo of their grandchildren that sits on top of Marlene’s computer, hangs a framed needlepoint quotation from the ancient Greek slave Aesop, which reads: “No kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.”
It is tempting to assume that Marlene stitched that precept—which survived for centuries in Aesop’s famous fables before it ended up on the wall of her spare bedroom in Salt Lake City—into the fabric herself, and that she and her husband must read it for inspiration before they sit down each day to work side by side as customer service agents for JetBlue. Marlene knows her mostly urban, East Coast callers would probably believe she and her Utah-based colleagues are just that earnest and sappy. But her conversations with customers make it clear she is a kind person by nature, with or without Aesop’s encouragement. As for the needlepoint? She won it as a door prize at a Mormon women’s conference a few years ago. She didn’t know what to do with it, so she put it in their office as an afterthought, hoping perhaps it might help remind them of their commitment to do unto others as you would have them do unto you—even though she knows not all of their customers live by that tenet themselves.
An impatient caller wants to change the date of his flight from San Diego to JFK Airport in New York. He is outraged when he hears about a change fee. Marlene calms him down without mentioning that he clicked on the fare rules when he booked his flight. She already practices much of what Kristal Anderson’s PowerPoint presentation reinforced at her team’s meeting the day before. She helps the man figure out if changing is worth the extra cost. It isn’t. Next is a dejected woman in New York who is going home to visit family in Puerto Rico and wants to leave on the last flight of the night because she has to work that day. She wants to arrange it so she can spend as much of her vacation time on the island as possible, but the late flight is more expensive than earlier flights and beyond her limited budget. Marlene spends a few minutes searching and finds her a cheaper late flight two days later and asks if she can switch her days off. The woman thinks she can. She hangs up happy. Then there is the slightly nervous mother in Florida who is sending her eleven-year-old son to visit his father, obviously her ex-husband, in New York City for the first time. Marlene patiently helps her through the lengthy process of booking an unaccompanied minor ticket, explaining all the rules clearly and stressing how seriously JetBlue takes her son’s safety and comfort.
All that in just the first twenty minutes or so of her shift. “One thing I do appreciate about this job,” Marlene says, “is I get to use my heart.” She describes herself as a people person. When she finds out someone is changing a flight because her husband is in the hospital, for instance, she’ll ask: “Is he going to be okay?” Marlene also knows the travel industry. Her first job during college, more than thirty years ago, was as a reservations agent with Holiday Inn. Then she worked as a travel agent in Arizona while Tom was in graduate school at the Thunderbird School of Global Management, and later in Salt Lake City. Her husband’s work in the international trucking business brought them there in the early 1980s, where they raised their two young sons. Now their older son lives in Ohio with his wife and child. Their younger son is serving in the army in Iraq. His wife and three kids live in Colorado.
The Goudies like the fact that their work at JetBlue gets them out of their own world for a while and gives them a glimpse of the everyday dramas in the lives of such a cross-section of Americans. Marlene says she routinely books trips for grandparents to meet new grandchildren, parents traveling to a son or daughter’s wedding, businesspeople on their way to high-level meetings, and she is especially attuned to the military families she helps. She’s heard a lot—like the newly divorced man arranging unaccompanied minor travel for his daughter to fly from his house in New York to her mother in Florida. Marlene got all the information she needed about the father, including his driver’s license number, his child’s full name, and his full name. She told him when and where to drop the child off at the airport. Then she asked who would be picking up the child. The man said simply, “That woman.” Marlene asked if he meant the child’s mother. He said he did but wouldn’t give any more details. Finally, Marlene told him gently, “You are going to have to utter your ex-wife’s name. That is the only way we can arrange your daughter’s arrival.” Eventually the man complied.
In her initial training, Marlene remembers hearing the nicknames other agents had made up for some of the more common offbeat types of customers she would encounter. “You’ve got Pervert Pete and Domineering Dave.” When those calls come in, she thinks, “Okay, it’s one of these guys,” and then does the best she can.
In the past few years, Marlene has noticed people becoming increasingly hostile. “They are more angry. They don’t seem to know how to reduce their stress and want to take it out on everyone.” Tom says about two or three times a week, he is asked impatiently if he is based in the United States or at some foreign call center. Marlene has been asked a few times if she was a real person or a recording. But Marlene says, “The ones I have the hardest time with are the people who are extremely demanding. You can tell, within the first three or four words out of their mouth, they’re used to getting their way. They don’t want anybody to tell them anything other than what they had in mind when they made the call.”
Tom says he is also convinced that people treat men and women differently over the phone. He hears Marlene having to deal with more hostility than he does. He has also been on the line when customers talk to his supervisor, who is a woman. “I’ve had calls where I’ve started and the guy was okay. But he wants a supervisor. So I get the supervisor on the line, and then he just goes ballistic. They’ll just be abusive to her. But they’ll talk to me and not be. I think some people feel more comfortable not being polite to women.”
Because there has been so much publicity about how JetBlue customer service agents are based in Salt Lake City and many are Mormon wives, Marlene says she has had to field a lot of personal questions. They start by asking if she is Mormon. “I say I am and just try to get them back to the business at hand.” But sometimes the questioners persist, and even go so far as to ask, “Do you have horns on your head?” or, “Do you dance around campfires?” Marlene tries to take it in stride. “I just laugh and say, ‘No, I look pretty normal.’” Sometimes they ask about her husband and if he has more than one wife. “I say he’s sitting right here next to me, and I’m his only wife. Occasionally, when a Pervert Pete calls, I just say, ‘Would you like to talk to my husband? I don’t think he would really like the things you’re saying to me.’”
But it is during really difficult travel periods that both Marlene and Tom sometimes turn to their faith to help them endure. “I don’t think I have prayed about only one, single phone call,” says Tom. “But I have prayed that I could get through a day before.” Like on Valentine’s Day 2007, when a winter storm crippled New York airports and many JetBlue passengers were stranded for long hours on the tarmac. Flights were being cancelled so frequently that JetBlue’s system couldn’t keep up. Then New York delays had a domino effect on the rest of the nation. Passengers were calling from inside the trapped planes, and then all those in the airports whose flights were cancelled were calling, as well as people with upcoming flights. The event got a lot of attention in the news media because of JetBlue’s previously sterling customer service reputation.
Tom arrived at his desk that morning at about 7:30, as usual. Marlene was still asleep. “As soon as I got on the phone, there were already four hundred calls backed up.” On an average day, the computer system that shows agents and supervisors how long customers are having to stay on hold would register about seventy calls, with an average wait time for customers of two minutes. That day the numbers were higher than anyone at JetBlue had ever seen before.
By the time Marlene got to her phone a few hours later, the crisis was in full swing. Her shift starts later than Tom’s, and he let her get her sleep that morning, knowing it might be the last peace either of them would have for a while. Along with most of their colleagues, Tom and Marlene worked almost nonstop for the next fifteen hours, and then for long hours again the following days. They would stop for meals and sometimes to lie down for a few minutes and then go back to the phones. Marlene says she was shocked at the way some customers acted during that time. “I had never heard things out of people’s mouths like they were saying. They were vicious—cursing, swearing, calling us idiots.” The airline had all hands on deck, even bringing in gate agents from the airport to help field the calls. “The airport people were amazed at the things that people would say to them on the phone,” Marlene remembers. “They actually told us, ‘There is no way customers would ever look me in the face and say the things that they are saying to us on the phone.’”
Marlene and Tom struggled to maintain their composure. Marlene says all the customers had complaints. That is not what got to her. It was “when they really personalize it and say, ‘You guys are all stupid.’ Or ‘You guys suck.’ You can try and say, ‘I realize you’re frustrated and I know you’re upset with me, but I am trying to help you.’” That doesn’t always work though.
The Goudies’ commitment to service is just what David Neeleman, the founder of JetBlue, who has since stepped down as CEO, had in mind when he decided to base the customer service operations in his hometown of Salt Lake City, even though the corporate headquarters is in New York City. Marlene feels a connection to Neeleman too, since they share the Mormon faith, and she believes he cares about his workers. During the Valentine’s Day problems, she says, “He was sending messages to us, saying, ‘I apologize for what’s happened. Take care of yourselves. But if you can help out, please do.’ That meant a lot to us knowing that he actually cared what we were going through.”
Marlene has shown that same kind of caring spirit from day one. She says she knew she was in the right place when she answered her very first call for JetBlue. It took her an hour and a half to complete it. But her supervisors didn’t complain. Instead, they understood they had hired the right person.
The call came from an elderly African American woman in Florida who had never been on an airplane. Her husband’s eightieth birthday was coming up that summer. He had never been on a plane either. She and her kids wanted to surprise him by flying him to New York. She would be traveling with him. She explained to Marlene that her husband had worked all his life. Because he grew up in the South during segregation, if he traveled, he had mostly ridden in the backs of buses. That’s why she didn’t care what day they traveled or which airport they landed at in New York. The only thing that mattered to her for this special flight was that she wanted him to ride at the front of the plane. JetBlue doesn’t have first class, another founding ethic of equality at the airline. But Marlene understood the situation. She spent as long as it took to find the right flights, with two seats in the very front row for this woman and her husband’s first, and possibly only, airline flight ever. Marlene says she got them the seats, and after the flight, the woman wrote to the company and thanked them for treating her and her husband so well. “All she wanted was for her husband to have the dignity that had been denied him for so much of his life. I wanted to make sure they got it too. After all, we’re taught we are all brothers and sisters of the same God.”
Frankie Littleford has been with JetBlue from the very beginning. She is now the vice president of reservations, meaning she is in charge of the whole customer service operation. She is also the recorded voice of the IVR system at JetBlue. When people call in, hers is the first voice they hear. Littleford started in the mid-1980s as a reservations agent at an Eastern Airlines call center in Salt Lake City. She then worked at Morris Air and Southwest Airlines with David Neeleman, JetBlue’s founder. Remembering her earliest days, she says a lot has changed. “Customers didn’t have the Internet where they could go make their own booking. Now the majority are so Internet-savvy. They really don’t want to pick up the phone. They just want self-service—to go online and figure it out themselves. More times than not, once a customer calls, they have already tried to solve it on their own. A phone call is reserved for those more intricate, unique, complex situations.”
That means training agents to handle calls properly is also more complex than it used to be. The typical training period for JetBlue agents is seven weeks. During that time, they learn all sorts of things, from company policies and computer systems to security measures, and how to handle the callers they will encounter. An important concept in teaching agents to be effective on the phone is what is called “mirroring” the customer—pacing their responses based on how the customer is interacting with them. “If it is the business traveler who’s speaking very quickly and not a whole lot of chitchat,” says Littleford, “that is how you need to be mirroring to meet their needs. If it’s the elderly woman who has more time and is kind of lonely and wants to chitchat, then you don’t need to be as hurried on that phone call.” Littleford says JetBlue is adamant about not giving their agents scripts to read. They teach the information agents need to impart and then depend on them to convey it in their own words, to personalize it.
Sometimes a customer service agent has to send a particularly difficult call to a supervisor; in the industry, that is referred to as call escalation. At JetBlue, escalated calls are handled by the crew support department. Approximately 168 crew support members work with the approximately 1,200 JetBlue customer service agents. They are experienced agents and have a bit more authority to make decisions about complicated calls than do the reservations agents like Marlene. They also work in the office more often than they do at home.
Walking through the spacious cubicles of the crew support department in the middle of JetBlue’s call center in Salt Lake City, it is hard not to notice Rolf DeVries. The sixty-something-year-old father of six and grandfather of seventeen is a one-man pep squad, therapy clinic, and motivational workshop. His shaved head and booming voice hint at his previous stint in the military. But his warm manner and jolly demeanor are what cause reservations agents to tell him so often how much they love him. “Thank you for being so perky,” says a newer agent who calls in for help with a change request she had never handled before. Another agent tells DeVries, “Thank you for restoring my emotions. They should give you a raise,” after he helps her with an angry customer who had lost his confirmation number.
In the early 2000s, DeVries, who is Mormon, moved to Salt Lake City and started at JetBlue as an agent. About six months later, he was bumped up to crew support. Along with freeing agents from having to handle the more complex calls, crew support also answers questions on procedure from agents. DeVries says he considers it part of his job to offer the frontline workers a boost. “The agent will go back and use the same tone of voice that I used with her, to the customer. So instead of just saying, ‘We can’t give compensation’ and being done with it, I would say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, we can’t give compensation, as much as we’d like to. But this is a weather-related delay. If it was up to me, I’d push the button and give you a thousand bucks, but we can’t. It’s weather related.’ Then the reservations agent will use the same tone with the customer. If we have a bad attitude, we can infect, in one or two days, all of JetBlue.”
He says he sees customer service as “keeping the clouds of negativity from rolling in. They’re always around, and you can get taken over by them unless you keep that sort of attitude. These reservations crew members, some of them are on the phone for eight to ten hours, so they want a little schmaltz.” That is exactly what DeVries gives them. He has toys that make sound effects in his drawer and sometimes will pull one out and use it to make agents laugh. “Customer service is an art. We’re performance artists. We’re trying to create a feeling. When you get on that line with a customer, you want to leave them with a warm, fuzzy feeling. They’re going to trust you to fly them at 30,000 feet. They figure, if you can’t get customer service right, how can they be sure that you are tightening the bolts on the plane right? They want to get a confident, happy, friendly voice, so they can feel better about the whole experience of flying.”
It isn’t as easy as DeVries makes it look. Just like a performer about to get up in front of a stadium concert crowd, he goes through rituals before, during, and after each shift. He reads books by motivational speaker Tony Robbins. He arrives an hour early each day and starts to mentally prepare himself. “It’s an exercise. It’s a discipline. It’s something you’ve got to do with your mind every single day. If you’re working a ten-hour shift, you’re going to have ten hours of people yelling at you. You’ve got to be very focused.”
When he gets to the phones and puts on his headset, he says a mantra to himself before he goes on the line. “Every time I have to program myself so that I don’t get defensive, or meet aggression with aggression. I say to myself, ‘This person is upset, but I’ll bet I can think of a way to make the customer at least happier.’ Or, ‘I hope I can empathize with this person so that they’ll know that they’re not the only ones concerned about this matter.’ When I start off the call, I use phrases like: ‘This is Rolf. I’m a JetBlue supervisor. I understand you have a problem I can help you with.’ Immediately that switches them to, ‘Oh, they’re not going to be defensive. They’re going to try and help me with my problem.’”
Then he encourages the customers to talk. “I say, ‘At this point just tell me what happened. I’m going to shut up now. I’m going to make noises just so you know that I’m here and that I’m interested and I’m going to ask questions when I have to. Otherwise, tell me what happened. I’m going to be taking notes, which will go to the people who are most appropriate to understand your problem and make sure this doesn’t happen again.’”
DeVries says he likes to take the most challenging callers. “We’re trying to turn irate customers around. As impossible as that may seem, it is possible to do. And not by throwing money at them—vouchers. Not by saying, ‘We’ll give you $150 if you’ll just go away and be happy.’ It’s an attitude of sympathetic listening.” The fact that his managers don’t judge him solely on the length of his calls is particularly helpful. “I’ve found that a huge amount can be defused by just taking the time to listen. If you’ve got an irate call and the person is in tears, the first thing is to take the time and listen—listening for when they’re wound down and then resolving the problem. You’ve got to sound empathetic. You’ve really got to try to empathize with the customer. I would say the hugest percentage of what that customer wants out of that call is just for somebody to listen. So you start—don’t try to do this right away. After they unload, you start asking them specific questions that will get them to the logical side of the brain: ‘What time was your flight supposed to leave? What was the number of your flight?’ So they’re moving from the emotional side to the rational side.”
At the cubicle across from DeVries in crew support is Brenda Schultz, who usually works from home but is spending a few days a month at the call center. Schultz is in her mid-forties and came to JetBlue after her kids were grown. She has worked in crew support since 2003. She is on the line with an agent who is trying to get a ticket changed for a woman on vacation whose mother has just had a stroke. The woman is trying to go back home to her mother. The agent says to Schultz, “I know how fast a family emergency can come up. If she is cutting her trip short, that kind of bites.” Schultz is sympathetic too.
The agent asks Schultz what kind of verification she has to get from the customer. First, Schultz checks the customer’s history on the computer to see if this particular customer’s mother has ever had a stroke before when she changed a flight. That would signal a ploy. Schultz says such skepticism goes with the job. “There are plenty of people who get away with all kinds of stuff. You really have to try the best you can to find the correct wording to ask questions and find out who’s real and who’s not. I think being a parent helps. There are always arguments or things that you’ve got to mediate. Customers will call with things, and you’ll think, ‘This is just like when my kids try to get one past me.’ There are a million different situations you’re dealing with.”
This passenger’s story checks out. She has never tried to change her travel dates before. Schultz and the agent begin to work on the switch. Schultz says the challenge is to keep treating the customers as human beings on the other end of the line—“but also not to internalize it. You have to keep some detachment, or you can get sucked into stories.”
As she and the agent go through the ticket change procedure, there are moments when the computer is processing the information. Schultz uses those seconds to chat with the agent. This agent is working from her basement at home and has music on in the background, which she turns off when talking to customers. “I get bored sometimes all by myself,” she confides in Schultz. “So I put a radio down here.” Schultz tells her she knows how it is. Then the agent goes back to the woman on hold and assures her they are sorting out her problem and will be able to change her ticket. She comes back on the line with Schultz, and as they work and wait, they talk casually about other aspects of the job and their lives. The ticket change takes about four minutes, and Schultz is able to give the agent some good cheer during that time. “As nice as it is, working from home can be hard too. You feel like you’re alone. So we just have to be that link to real people for them—give moral support to help them survive. You kind of have to be that listening ear.”
Just as every customer has a story of bad treatment at the hands of some customer service agent, whenever two or more agents get together, they can easily trade odd-customer stories. Schultz remembers the woman who called very upset that when she popped open her soft drink on a flight, it didn’t make the fizzy popping sound she thought it should. She demanded a free round trip. Schultz also tells about a man who wanted a free round trip because his overhead light didn’t work on his last flight. Then DeVries remembers the story of a woman who called and said that the door blew off during her flight and people were being sucked out of the plane. She said she grabbed another passenger so he wouldn’t be sucked out too. She wanted her money back, even though she couldn’t recount any other details of the flight or explain why no one had heard of the incident at the airline.
DeVries and Schultz conduct a half-day class for newly hired agents at JetBlue University in which they impart a lot of tricks of their trade. But Schultz believes the bottom line is that it takes a certain kind of person to do customer service well. “You can’t be a callous, I-don’t-care-about-you person, because your colors are going to show through and it’s not going to work. You have to want to help somebody. It’s got to be in your heart to have empathy.” There is only so much that they can instill in new agents. DeVries remembers a JetBlue executive who brought that home to him in his initial training. He told the class: “I can teach you how to fly the airplane. I can teach you how to count beans. Given enough time, I can teach every single one of you every operation. But the one thing I can’t teach is, I can’t teach you to be nice.”
Still, Schultz says she has learned some techniques from watching DeVries, a New Jersey native, deal with East Coast customers who, she says, are a bit more “argumentative” than people from the rest of the country. “Rolf has taught us all that it’s the battle, not so much who wins or not. They like the fight.” Schultz says that helps her not take some of those calls personally.
“A lot of customer service is a cultural thing,” DeVries says. But he also believes that some of the hostility goes beyond regional styles of communicating. “It’s also about our society. Today it’s all right to completely insult people. It’s hip to degrade. And you get that both coming and going in customer service. So you’ve got to decide beforehand how much abusive language you’re going to take. Some people just don’t like abusive language at all, and they’ll disconnect the call immediately when the customer starts swearing. We try not to do that because often the customer, quite rightly, is upset. The question is how you’re going to handle it. Some people say, ‘Look, let’s cut the swearing or I’ve got to hang up.”
DeVries handles it a little differently. “Me? I say, ‘Harry, look, I’m taking notes. I’m putting down everything you’ve said. And they’re not going to take it seriously if you keep using those words.’” With most customers, DeVries has found that this less direct approach is effective.
Accurate numbers on just how many people work as customer service representatives in the United States are difficult to find. In 2008, most of the best data from consultants and academics who analyze the customer service industry put the number at somewhere around 3 million, which is about 2 percent of the total U.S. labor force. But the definition of who is included in the occupation and who is not varies from study to study, which makes it hard to pin down consistent statistics and projections. A more conservative yet very detailed estimate is produced every few years by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
In 2006, the BLS reported there were about 2.2 million customer service reps in the United States. It also put customer service representatives third on the list of occupations expected to have the largest growth by 2016, behind nurses and retail salespeople. It projected that the number of reps will rise 25 percent, to 2.74 million, by 2016. The median annual salary of a customer service rep in 2007 was $29,040, according to the BLS, and the median hourly salary was $13.96. States with the highest concentration of customer service workers were Arizona, South Dakota, Texas, Georgia, and Florida. The town with the highest concentration of customer service workers was Sioux Falls, South Dakota, followed by Lubbock, Texas; Jacksonville, Florida; Salt Lake City; and San Antonio, Texas.
The finance and insurance industries have the highest concentration of customer service agents, employing 23 percent of all reps. Other industries with a large number of reps are telecommunications, information technology, and utilities. Eleven percent of customer service reps worked in retail, which was defined as a separate occupation from retail salespeople. The BLS pointed out in 2006 that most customer service jobs involved work on the telephone, with much of the work going on in some sort of call center. Most require at least a high school diploma, but the BLS said that because “employers are demanding a higher-skilled workforce, many customer service jobs now require an associate or bachelor’s degree. High school and college-level courses in computers, English, or business are helpful in preparing for a job in customer service.” Most reps worked a forty-hour week, although many worked at odd hours to keep customer service help available twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week. Seventeen percent of all reps across all industries worked part-time.
The BLS report mentioned that technological innovations such as the Internet and new functions on telephones had affected the occupation in the past few years, doing away with some functions of the job and enabling companies to send some call center jobs out of the country. But the report still projected that the need for reps in the United States would rise. “In many ways, technology has heightened customers’ expectations for information and services, and the availability of information online seems to have generated more need for customer service representatives. Also, technology cannot replace human skills. As more sophisticated technologies are able to resolve many customers’ questions and concerns, the nature of the inquiries handled by customer service representatives is likely to become increasingly complex.”
The 2006 report also discussed the working conditions in call centers, saying some “may be crowded and noisy, and work may be repetitious and stressful, with little time between calls. Workers usually must attempt to minimize the length of each call, while still providing excellent service. To ensure that these procedures are followed, conversations may be monitored by supervisors, which can be stressful. Also, long periods spent sitting, typing, or looking at a computer screen may cause eye and muscle strain, backaches, headaches, and repetitive motion injuries. Customer service representatives may have to deal with difficult or irate customers, which can be challenging. However, the ability to resolve customers’ problems has the potential to be very rewarding.”
Some academic studies have focused on those kinds of pressures of the job. Psychologists at Frankfurt University in Germany found that working in a call center could be dangerous to an agent’s health. The culprit, according to a 2006 study, is having to exude what they called “fake happiness.” In addition to interviewing more than 4,000 customer service workers at airports, hospitals, and call centers, the psychologists set up a simulated call center and had eighty student volunteers act as staff. Half of that group was told they could talk back to rude customers, but the other half was told they had to remain positive and cordial at all times. For the group that was allowed to defend themselves, abuse from customers had little lasting effect on their heart rates and overall health. The other group had higher heart rates long after the upsetting phone calls.
The study concluded that most people can handle short bursts of pretending to be happy, but a job that requires people to fake their happiness for extended periods is another matter. “Every time a person is forced to repress his true feelings,” said Professor Dieter Zapf, who headed up the study, “there are negative consequences for his health. We all control our emotions. But it becomes a problem when it’s over a long period.” In addition, the study showed that the amount of latitude a worker is given to make decisions and have some control over a job is another contributing factor to stress levels. “Even though a social worker may experience a great deal of emotional stress in a day, she can choose when to walk away and take a quiet five minutes. Someone working in a call center just has to keep answering the phone, and often finds it hard to take a break, so their stress levels just keep climbing. That tends to lead to burnout and depression.”
A British academic study published in 2003, “Psychological Risk Factors in Call Centres,” reported that “the risk of mental health problems is higher for call handlers and job-related well-being is lower compared to employees in other occupations.” The report went on to say that some call center workers had it worse than others, including those who worked in the telecommunications and information technology sectors and those who worked in call centers with fifty or more employees. Some of the elements that made the jobs most stressful for the workers were “high workload,” lack of clarity about their roles, and not making “full use of their skills.” The study concluded that to improve the well-being of workers, companies should increase autonomy for workers and give them “more variety in their tasks.”
Another academic study of call centers, this one in Sydney, Australia, during the early 1990s, surveyed workers and concluded that many companies took a “sacrificial” approach to the well-being of customer service agents. Since the agents weren’t expected to stay in the jobs for long, the reasoning went, working them until they burned out was fine as long as it was profitable to do so.
Professor Zapf, the head of the “fake happiness” study in Germany, concluded that people doing call center work are underappreciated. “It’s about time we did away with the concept that the customer is always right,” he said, “and showed more respect for those in customer service jobs.”
Of course, not all customer service work is drudgery, and not all workers are unhappy. But the plight of those who are is not only well documented in government reports and in international peer-reviewed academic studies, it is also well represented anecdotally on the Internet. At the social networking site Facebook, for example, a sampling of groups made up of disgruntled customer service workers have such names as “Customer Service is slowly driving me insane,” “Working in Customer Service Made Me Bitter and Hateful,” and “If you don’t like my customer service…i hate you.” There is also a British Internet bulletin board created by and for retail and call center workers in the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States called CustomersSuck.com. The introduction to that site says it is meant to be “a bastion of sanity for those on the frontlines of customer service. This site is a place to vent, share, sympathise, comfort, exchange information of use, share a laugh, and generally relax.” Various other call center employees have taken to periodic blogging about their jobs.
The introduction to one customer service representative’s blog starts out: “Think it’s easy answering the phone for a living? Think again! You might be a nice person, but something happens when people call a toll-free telephone number. I guess they think we have no feelings, since we’re only a voice on the other end of the phone.”
Another customer service rep writes a blog that sometimes addresses work issues. In an entry called “What Customer Service Reps Have to Deal With,” he says:
Well today, it’s time to vent! Today I’m going to bitch about all of the crap we as call center, customer service representatives have to deal with from our customers! Though, I want everyone who reads this to understand that I’m not some kind of disgruntled employee that hates my job. (Quite the opposite.) Nevertheless, these are common frustrations I deal with every single day….
“I’m Not Taking This Out on You”
One of my pet peeves! Irate people yell at me all the time, then promptly say that god-awful phrase because they want to make sure you don’t hang up on them. What amazes me though, is that these people continue to take out all of their lives’ frustrations on me, even if I had nothing to do with it and I’m trying to help them! Reps often get used as the “punching bags” for customers, which is totally not fair. What typically happens is they get all mad at us, then ask for a supervisor where they are all nice and sweet. Here’s a tip: if you can be nice, don’t be a jerk towards us. You’ll get a lot more accomplished if you stay calm, and very little accomplished if you yell at us.
“I Hate Your Automated System” & Other
Things Outside Our Control
We reps have zero control over things like this. If we had it our way, there would be no automated system. We also don’t have any control over company policies, only that we’re supposed to follow them as closely as possible. (Supervisors can’t wave a magic wand for you and change things instantly, either.) We are not the choice makers in the company.
Being Treated as Machines
You know, it’s funny…people often complain how much they hate dealing with the “machine” that is the automated system before they talk to a rep. Yet, as soon as they get to us, they treat us as if we’re some kind of machine that just spews out whatever response they want from us. I have a good feeling that if it was a face-to-face conversation, it would be different. The thing is though, it shouldn’t be like that. We’re human. A few “pleases” and “thank yous” would be awfully nice to show your appreciation in speaking with a live person.
A few bloggers wax poetic about what they encounter as agents. One of the most read bloggers, until he quit his call center job after a few years, called himself “Anonymous Cog” and his blog “CallCenterPurgatory.com.” His own description of the blog read: “Exploring the mind-numbing insanity and childish corporate culture of an unknown call center employee.” In an entry entitled “A Sea of Service,” he spoke of the pressures he felt:
When I put the headphone on my head it all started. The calls began like a wave of the ocean. Sometimes I can swim with it, sometimes I actually bodysurf, but more often than not I feel like I am drowning in people’s needs for service.
“I need my account updated.”
“I’ve been holding forever!”
“I’m having problems accessing your website…”
“This is unacceptable!”
“Someone needs to…”
“There is a problem with…”
“Every time I call…”
“Why won’t you…”
ENOUGH!!!!!
In an entry called “Wandering Through a Wonderland of Rage,” Anonymous Cog said, “If this place has taught me anything, it’s that all people have the ability to be evil and unkind, and we all have to fight to be human every day.”
The pressures on frontline call center agents certainly abound. In part because of that, one of the biggest problems in the industry is employee turnover. Again, exact numbers are hard to come by, but attrition among customer service agents each year ranges anywhere from 25 to 75 percent in call centers. Personnel costs, including recruiting and training of new employees, are the biggest expenses of most call centers, so attrition is a serious concern. Recent efforts have been made to address the causes of turnover in the industry and to do a better job of retaining employees. Some call centers even have developed elaborate measures to predict when an employee might be about to jump ship and see if they can be kept. In addition, companies are having to become more scientific about whom they hire in the first place, with some conducting psychological profiles of potential agents and picking those with the qualities that will most likely endure and even thrive in a call center.
The sweatshop model of call centers is still the template in a few companies, but most in the industry have become more sophisticated in managing workers and customers. For example, many call centers forecast the volume of incoming calls based on the number of calls they received at the same time of day, week, and month the previous year, so that staffing can be adjusted to best handle higher call volumes.
The call center manager, however, still has to juggle the interests of customers, the company, and its employees. The key is to try to make those interests align. One example of that balancing act is call monitoring, which takes place in most call centers. Recording phone calls can be used to reward good call handling on the part of agents, though it is also, of course, potentially invasive for agents and customers alike. But knowing exactly what went wrong on a call can also validate a customer’s claims of bad service and help the company make necessary reparations so it doesn’t lose the customer.
As with agents, anecdotal evidence of the challenges that the people running call centers encounter can be found on the Internet. In a blog called “Call Center Steel Cage Death Match,” a supervisor discusses some of the issues he faces:
Of all the components comprising the call center and customer service nothing is of greater importance than the human interaction. It all boils down to two people talking to each other.
So, the crux of the job, from the rep’s perspective (and this, I believe, is the most important thing for a call center manager to meditate upon), is that the conversation is always one-sided and has one aim: one person (the customer) is always talking about his or hers needs to the rep with the expectation of having the rep take care of/fix/listen to/address/give satisfaction/delight etc. etc. to the customer.
This is not bad or undesirable or unreasonable. But the true challenge of a call center agent is being able to deal with this call after call. It is this aspect that should guide the hiring decisions (i.e., can you somehow make an assessment regarding the candidate’s capacity for fielding pleas for help.)
He has come to believe there is also a responsibility on the part of the customer in the interaction:
Technology will not replace humans’ need and desire to speak to one of their own kind—i.e. not a machine. The upshot is that we need each other in our daily transactions. We want to make a phone call, or send an email, and have a genuine human interaction in which a genuine human helps us out.
But I believe, contrary to the “have it your way” consumer culture that has become standard, that we (customers) have a responsibility to behave in the same manner that we expect from those who answer our calls. Making unreasonable demands, treating a call center rep poorly, using degrading and abusive language is not right or acceptable. Sometimes, the customer, contrary to “have it your way” culture, is not right.
Another supervisor blog, “The Supervisor of Customer Service Hell,” is more charged. This supervisor describes himself as “the company’s wage-slave, my manager’s gofer, the puppet of the upper brass, the faceless representative of ‘The Man’—the one that’s responsible for shepherding over all of this misery that you see.” He goes on: “I’m a supervisor working in a customer service call center owned by a huge multi-national corporation. I like to write about my observations—or, more often, about amusing or horrifying episodes at work.” In an entry entitled “Apathy,” he says:
I feel a strange lassitude about [my job]. My anger and rage has started to even out to general depression and despair about management, but genuine pleasure as well in dealing with my core group. I guess, now that I think about it, I really don’t feel bad at all. I’ve gotten hugged this week. I’ve been told that I was the best boss someone ever had. I’ve been told that I’ve made this job better than anything else in their life for someone, and I’m happy about that. I guess I’ve found that little spark that made me like being a supervisor to begin with.
So, you know what? I’ll always get mad about the stupid corporate policies, ridiculous management types who can’t walk the talk, useless employees that I can never seem to get permission to fire, and endless turnover. I may move to another job. But, in a moment of extreme anger, I took a step back and realized that I need to find happiness in what I’m doing—the “Zen of supervising,” if you will.
That’s what I try to tell myself, anyway. Stress, it’ll kill you.
While the telephone is still the main communication line between customers and companies, the use of other channels such as text messaging, instant messaging, and e-mails is becoming more prevalent. In recognition of that expansion, the term call center has been replaced by, or at least is being used interchangeably with, the term contact center within the industry. As companies steer more customers to self-service channels such as the Web and IVRs to take care of the simple transactions that were once some of the telephone customer service agent’s most basic functions, the perception among customers is that anything but live phone help is cheaper for companies. That is true, except for e-mail, which is the most time-consuming and therefore most expensive channel for a company to offer. Instant messaging is cheaper than the phone or e-mails because agents can take care of more than one IM or text message at a time. But as newer channels are adopted in the customer’s world, such as video messaging on cell phones and computer phone lines and phone calls migrating to the Internet, contact centers are having to keep up with how their customers prefer to communicate. In the not-too-distant future, live video interactions with agents on the Internet will likely become common in contact centers.
But for all the Internet and self-service innovations, studies show that customers still prefer a live phone conversation. The Internet and consumer technology consulting firm Jupiter Research predicts that while the use of the Web for customer service will increase in the next few years, it will make up only 14 percent of the more than 50 billion contacts between customers and companies predicted to occur in 2012. That apparently unflagging demand for live phone contact is what led the call center industry to turn to outsourcing in the past decade. To meet demand and reduce the time customers spend on hold, the reasoning went, hiring more people at a lower cost without sacrificing quality was a promise many in the industry couldn’t resist.
Outsourcing comes in many forms. A company can set up its own call centers in a foreign country to take advantage of lower labor costs. Or a company can contract with an outsourcing supplier to set up and run call centers for it domestically or in foreign countries, or both. Technological advances have spurred outsourcing as the migration of telephone communication to the Internet and the worldwide spread of high-speed Web networks mean all the agents don’t have to be in one place to do their work. So contact centers no longer have to be on site at a company, as they generally did until at least the late 1990s.
A report on customer service outsourcing by the International Customer Management Institute surveyed contact center managers, primarily in North America, and found that nearly 30 percent of call centers outsource some portion of their company’s customer contacts. The most common outsourced functions were the most basic requests, as well as overflow during peak times, after-hours inquiries, and contacts in a foreign language. Saving money was the main reason for outsourcing contact center work, cited by 65 percent of the managers surveyed. Some said they also outsourced to “tap into the overall experience and expertise” of the companies that specialize in handling the customer service contacts of their client companies.
India has gotten most of the attention for being a contact center destination. Large Indian outsourcing companies such as Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, and Wipro have grown exponentially during the country’s boom. But one of the largest contact center outsourcing companies in the world is Cincinnati-based Convergys, which has contact centers in the United States and internationally, including in India. The company says that more than half of the top fifty companies on the Fortune 500 list are clients. Other outsourcing companies based in the United States and abroad are also major players in the business and run contact centers all over the world as well. Those include French-based Teleperformance and U.S.-based Sitel, among many others. Annual revenues for every one of these largest outsourcing companies are in the billions of dollars. They all operate multilingual contact centers worldwide, and each has well over 50,000 employees.
Despite all the promises, foreign contact centers have gotten a reputation for bad service among American customers, who have repeatedly expressed dismay at speaking to agents whose accents they found hard to understand, especially from India. In response, more emphasis has been placed on training at many foreign call centers. But some call center jobs have also migrated back to the United States, even though salaries for American employees are exponentially higher than those of workers in the countries where work is most often outsourced. In addition, some state and federal laws now specify that government contracts must be filled by workers in the United States, so outsourcing to India or beyond is not always an option. These factors have left companies searching again for other lower-cost possibilities.
The concept of work-at-home agents, pioneered by companies like JetBlue, has become one of the fastest-growing and most promising such trends in contact center outsourcing. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2006 that the number of home-based agents in the United States had tripled since 2000. A survey in 2006 of U.S. and Canadian centers found that 24 percent of all agents were based in their homes. Homesourcing, as it is sometimes called, appeals to working parents, semiretired workers, and disabled workers in particular. Seventy to 80 percent have college degrees, compared to 30 to 40 percent of contact center workers. And most home-based workers are in their thirties and forties, older than average call center employees. Agents are generally given strict rules about keeping the noise of dogs and children off the lines, and their calls are recorded and monitored just as closely as in a traditional call center setting.
Homesourcing saves companies money on the overhead of running a call center, especially real estate and utility costs. It also saves money by cutting attrition and absenteeism rates, since at-home workers are generally happier. And it attracts more educated agents who would not normally want to work in a call center setting. Without commuting, agents working from home also reduce a company’s carbon footprint.
Most of the major multinational outsourcing companies have created work-at-home programs. But during the past decade or so, new domestic outsourcing companies have also formed that exclusively supply work-at-home agents. Some of the first include Arise, LiveOps, Working Solutions, and Alpine Access. And more are on the way.
It was the urge for a change of lifestyle that led Sean Erickson to start a work-at-home outsourcing company called Cloud 10 in 2005. For more than twenty years, he had moved up in customer service management at major companies, including Dell, MCI, and the large Denver-based outsourcer TeleTech. He had helped set up call center operations for companies all over North America and in the Philippines. But in his early forties, he came to a crossroads and took some time to figure out what to do next with his life. At first, he just spent time with his three daughters. “Never having taken off more than seven days consecutively, I took four months off. I just did stuff with my kids, and didn’t think about working.” After having been so driven for so many years, it took a while for him to adjust to being at home more, to the change of pace that allowed him to enjoy other parts of his life besides work. “I was not used to checking out like that, so it didn’t feel like a luxury for a long time.” He would wake up and say, “I don’t have to go to work tomorrow. I don’t have to be boss. I don’t have to put on that executive armor.” That was the subtle beginning of a revelation that showed him what his next move would be.
“I had been watching this whole work-at-home call center thing evolve,” he said, “ever since I did a pilot work-at-home agent program for MCI in about 1993. We did it back then because we were exploding in growth, and every call center you build, with the technology and the real estate commitments, the infrastructure, it’s a $10 million–plus investment. So we were looking for another way. People were starting to talk about work at home, but nobody was really doing it. So we did a test. I think eight or twelve agents were allowed to work at home for three months. What we found was that their job satisfaction was higher. Their customer satisfaction scores were better than anybody else’s. Their work quality was better. But at that time the technology for it was not very good. Then fast-forward to where we are today. Broadband really allows us to connect to the agents’ homes with speed. And the overall call center infrastructure has evolved where we can deliver those calls and manage those agents much like we do in a call center.”
Toward the end of his four-month hiatus, Erickson was asked to lunch by an investor in Alpine Access, one of the largest of the work-at-home agent companies based just outside Denver, where Erickson lives. This investor wanted to pick Erickson’s brain about the call center industry. “Then he started talking about the work-at-home business and how bullish he was about it, and where he thought it was going to go.” Erickson’s growing fondness for the less corporate lifestyle he was living came together with his memories of the experiment from his MCI days. The path seemed clear. “Somewhere between lunch and dessert, I thought, ‘Why don’t I just do that? I know the industry. I’ve got great contacts. I can go do that.’”
He also believed that this part of the customer service industry was still new enough that there was room for two or three companies to set themselves apart from what he was sure would be many entrants into the field in coming years. Plus, Erickson always liked being a part of global contact center outsourcing. “It’s very exciting, because you really get to be a part of many different industries. You’re supporting clients across a broad range of industries. So if you’re intellectually curious about these kinds of things, you can become very well versed in what drives financial services industries, what drives telecommunications, or what drives transportation.” Cloud 10 is backed by the Danish call center outsourcing firm Transcom. By its third year of operations, Cloud 10 employed a thousand agents and was recruiting in twenty-nine states.
In less ambitious forms, the work-at-home idea is also being used to give job options to other groups of workers, such as disabled military veterans, including those injured in combat in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. A program to train veterans to do call center work from their homes was implemented by the Military Order of the Purple Heart in 2005.
Another unexpected niche for work-at-home agents is in the fast food industry. When customers drive up to a McDonald’s or Wendy’s in many cities, their orders are no longer taken by an employee a few feet away. Instead they could be answered by someone working from home in a small town in North Dakota. A company called Verety has hired more than 250 at-home workers to take the drive-through orders at more than fifty McDonald’s restaurants and relay them back to the on-site workers making the Big Macs, fries, Happy Meals, and other food. Since it shaves precious seconds off each order and thereby saves money, many fast food companies have instituted this kind of remote order taking for their drive-throughs. But most use workers based in call centers run by outsourcing companies. Verety is one of the few outsourcers that uses at-home workers to handle the orders. Verety’s CEO, John Jasper, told the Associated Press that fast food customers from Florida to Washington State are “talking to moms and grandmoms working out of their basements in rural North Dakota. It’s going to take a few years, but this could be a big income source for people in rural communities.”
At-home agents aren’t the only way U.S. businesses are trying to backtrack on foreign outsourcing. Alternative call centers have shown up in other unique environments. Unicor, a branch of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, is operating call centers in prisons, employing about two thousand inmates around the country to take directory assistance calls and phone inquiries for government agencies. Agents tend to be minimum-and medium-security prisoners, and mostly female. They don’t handle any personal or financial customer information, and pay has been reported to range from as low as 8 cents to as much as $1.25 an hour. A percentage of their wages goes to victim assistance funds. Unicor sees itself as competing with international outsourcers. On its Web site, it calls itself “the best kept secret in outsourcing! All the benefits of domestic outsourcing at offshore prices.” Unicor then touts its “low labor rates, native English and Spanish language skills, high security,” and “locations throughout the country.” State prisons have also gotten into the act. Katey Grabenhorst, an inmate at an Oregon women’s prison, had finished serving her five-year sentence for attempted murder when she told USA Today that the customer service job she held at the Oregon Department of Motor Vehicles during her imprisonment had “brought self-esteem, order, skills and a stable income” to her life.
Another alternative kind of call center is being pioneered in eastern Oregon by the global consulting and outsourcing firm Accenture, formerly Andersen Consulting. Accenture is teaming with the Umatilla Native American tribe to create Cayuse Technologies, a call center and information technology outsourcing company within the United States. The idea came from Randy Willis, a senior consultant in Accenture’s government group who is from the Lakota Sioux tribe in South Dakota. Driven by a growing client demand for low-cost, U.S.-based outsourcing options, Willis had been researching the prospect of creating such a company on a Native American reservation. He knew he had to find the right place for a pilot program. The tribes don’t pay corporate income taxes, which helps them provide a lower-cost alternative than many other U.S.-based outsourcers. Among the tribes Willis researched, the Umatilla reservation had an unemployment rate of 17 percent, which while high, is lower than that among many Native American tribes. That meant the tribe had a relatively stable workforce. In addition, since Willis’s wife is from the Umatilla tribe, he had good connections with them. So during a family visit, Willis presented the idea to the chief, who embraced it. In 2006 Accenture entered into a five-year contract to train employees in call center and technology jobs. It was the first time a major international outsourcer had teamed with a Native American tribe to create such a company.
BusinessWeek ran an article about Cayuse’s pilot program with the headline “The Other Indian Outsourcer,” which was not only a clever twist on that singular partnership, but also encapsulated the circuitous route that all contact center outsourcing has taken in the past ten to fifteen years as the boundaries between being at work and at home, and between national and multinational identities, have grown less distinct.