Good luck finding anyone willing to work in a call center at the current going rates, with as much knowledge as somoene working in the field. Or someone who is an IT professional. Its just not going to happen with any company. Not to mention the high turn around rate at call centers. Theres not much companies can do to fix this, and keep the business running profitablly. The minimum requirements to work at most all (including BHN) call centers is a high school diploma. Aside from that they are trained to deal with "Most all common calls", they do have tier levels with reps who have been their longer, who can handle almost all issues. But call 10 times in a row youd be lucky to find someone whos been their longer then a year in those 10 calls.
As far as resumes go, when you have to have 300 positions filled, you get real slim pickens as to the pool of workers you can pick from. When staffing a call center you have to base a lot of it on personality, because you need to know they can communicate well with people. Thats the toughest part of the job, the technical stuff can be taught. In your example of "ping" who knows if the person you spoke to was a simple level1 tech their job is to take orders process them, setup work orders etc. And they have a computer that tells them basic troubleshooting stuff and steps they need to go through.
I don't fully agree with you. I partially do, but not fully. On one hand, I know what you mean by pay being low at a call center. But one of my first computer jobs was doing tech support for dial up. As tech savvy as I am, I made the fast track to second level support. I worked with many knowledgeable individuals. I also worked with some not so knowledgeable. But I have to say doing this sort of job was a great way to get started. For anybody with a knack for tech who wants to get a career started, call centers are great. You cannot take a non-tech person and make them a tech person with training. You just can't. I have been doing tech long enough. Sure, you can teach the average person basic stuff, how to read from a script and so forth, but you cannot make them truly understand it. I hire a lot of young people just starting out. All they need is a chance to excel. A lot of companies don't want to give them a chance because they have no experience. But if they have true skills and a personality, they make excellent employees in the field and would make good call center employees. So I think it is the other way around. You can't train tech, you can train customer service skills.
As far as the pool of employees being slim pickens, I am not so sure about that either. Heck, whenever a new Walmart opens with 400 jobs you hear about 2500 people applying. Just about any job gets way more applicants than jobs to be filled. I say again, if the hiring manager understands the technology and the need, they can hire the right people. They would be better off hiring a bright kid with no experience but a knack for tech than they would some 30 something that has six years call center experience selling Billy Mays garbage and NO TECH SUPPORT experience. Again, they can train that young bright kid in customer skills. But I think these call centers make the same mistake you have made. They are hiring on personality and thinking they can train tech skills.
Quick funny but sad story/thought- When I was laid off in 2003, before going from part time to full time with my business servicing computers, I took a job for a national cell phone chain doing tech support for $12.50/hr in Tampa because I HAD to take something. After nine months of looking and slowly growing my businesses' billable hours, I had to work. Well, we started in like October and training went through Christmas. As the weeks went by it became clearer that the job really sucked and many of us laughed about how we were going to quit after training. It was sick. There were people in there from all walks of life being trained on cell phone tech support. Most of which had no business being in there. The only reason I was in there was because I needed some money. Well, with a training class of like twenty, all of us quit except like three by the end. What a waste of money on behalf of the call center. And the funny thing is, they expected this. They knew that of all the training classes, there was going to be a huge turnover. Why not hire the right people from the start and pay them better? They spent weeks paying to train these people that they knew would leave, hoping to get a few "suckers" to work for $12.50 and keep them around after training. Not that it matters really, but many of the people left because they found out during week six or seven that all new people would be stuck on second or third shift. They should have been told sooner.
I think one of the biggest problems is pay. As a business owner myself, I would much rather pay better and have somebody stick around who doesn't cause me a lot of problems, than to pay crappy and have them leave and be back to square one. Most call centers, like any job, don't want to pay their people. Like they say, the best way to get a raise is to find a new job. Pretty sad. Because the person leaves for bad pay and then the company ends up hiring somebody for the same pay the person leaving was asking for, or more!
