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US Call-Center Jobs — That Pay $100K a Year
bheer writes "BusinessWeek profiles a call center company called iQor which has grown revenues 40% year-on-year by (shock) treating employees as critical assets. It's done this not by nickel-and-diming, but by expanding its US operations (13 centers across the US now), giving employees universal health insurance, and paying salaries and bonuses that are nearly 50% above industry norms. The article notes that outsourcing will continue and globalization will continue to change the world's economic landscape. 'But the US is hardly helpless. With smart processes and the proper incentives, US companies can keep jobs here in America, and do so in a way that is actually better for the company and its employees.' Now if only other companies get a clue as well."
A phrase I saw in the summary almost had me sending a note to timothy from the "See any serious problems with this story? Email our on-duty editor" link, then when I RTFA I saw that it was word for word from TFA: "IQor also gives its U.S. employees universal health insurance".
A meaningless phrase, I think. The words "health insurance" suffices; universal health insurance is what Canadian and European residents get from their government. Bad writing at the least, which lead me to suspect that there were bad facts as well. However, most of the rest of it seemed well written.
Sure, some companies, such as Dell (DELL), have moved call centers back home after customer protests.
Makes it look like the customers are protesting outsourcing, when in fact what pisses most people off is that the offshore phone monkeys are completely unintelligible. If you're handling calls from Mexican customers, your call center workers should be able to speak fluent Spanish, not bad Spanish like I speak.
The best of iQor's front-line call-center workers make more than $100,000 per year.
What's the starting wage? TFA doesn't say.
And unlike many of its competitors, and an increasing number of other U.S. companies, iQor offers all its employees good health insurance and generous benefits packages.
Some time in the early 1980s, the head of one of the airlines (that ironically became a union airline later) said "any company that gets a union deserves one". Treat your employees like shit, and they will treat your customers like shit, and may even organize a union.
IQor also invests in technology designed to make its employees more efficient
Gad, there's little I hate worse than robocallers. When I say "hello" you better echo my "hello" PDQ or I'm hanging the phone up. You called me; don't put me on hold as soon as I answer without even responding.
From TFS: But the US is hardly helpless. With smart processes and the proper incentives, U.S. companies can keep jobs here in America, and do so in a way that is actually better for the company and its employees.
That assumes that today's busiesspeople aren't so greedy and stupid that they're like the monkey who has his hand stuck in the jar, too stupidly greedy to let go of the treat inside. A pretty unwarranted assumption, I think.
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This is how the small business I work for operates. They treat employees as a vital resource and asset. They know they invest a lot of time and money to hire and train us so they compensate us well according to how well we help the company make money. They know that without the people doing the work the business wouldn't make money. It's how companies used to operate and imho how they should operate.
Sure in the lean times we don't get the nice bonuses we are used to but we get to keep our jobs because they don't squander away money when times are good because they know bad times are coming.
Common sense that seems lost in this day and age.
read the fucking article
Hate to say this, but the company I work for (pick any 3 letters), and any other IT company ends up doing the same thing as this company.
Either they get competent staff on the front lines, or your back end Sys Engineering staff ends up supporting issues they should have been handled at the front lines.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
Quote: "But the US is hardly helpless. With smart processes and the proper incentives, U.S. companies can keep jobs here in America
.
Managers rarely care, and even more rarely, have the technical expertise to handle labor decisions in ways that benefit themselves and the country. Their entire focus is getting that next bonus. If they have to move 75% of their operations to lower Slobbovia to do it, they will, rather than spend the 15 minutes of googling and thinking that would allow them to do the job more efficiently and cheaply in the USA.
.
Unfortunately, in the USA, most managers have MBAs but nothing else, an education which seems to leave most of them with the ability to do almost anything financial except understand and run a business in real time.
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In addition to these benefits, the company also offers world peace, satellite launches, and ponies.
...just ditch the regulations that drive companies overseas in the first place - minimum wage, and regulations based on political pull (e.g. govt-union partnerships), for starters.
I suspect the fact that these people are incredibly efficient and good at their jobs means that you're less likely to be on the phone for an hour, which appears to be the point. They may get paid 4x more than the average phone jockey, but if they can handle 5x as many calls, then they are a better deal.
Immigrants have always been key innovators in American business. Nothing ironic about that.
If you've already made a decision to provide crap customer service (an MBA would call it "minimizing service cost to the extent feasible"), it is cheaper to do this from locations with low labor costs. Most companies still prefer to provide crap customer service, and if you call almost any company selling cable, wireless, credit card, satellite, ISP service, banking, or insurance of any kind this is what you're likely to get.
I presume that iQor is working with clients in high-value segments where high-quality customer service still matters. At this point, such a market is relatively small. There's no doubt it costs more, because you have to be able to retain the good reps, which means you can't put as much pressure on them to meet quotas, and you have to pay them more, and generally put up with things like doctor visits and bathroom breaks that drive down productivity. And you have to hire managers who actually know how to manage and motivate people. Compared to low-wage offshore locations, you end up paying 10x or 20x as much per call (I'm guessing).
The wireless places and the banks and credit cards aren't, at this point, willing to do this. They model how much churn they're going to get, and what it will cost them, and decide that it isn't worth it. So it's a niche, where if you've sold someone a $20,000 injection molding machine or something, you feel more compelled to have someone on the phone who can actually figure out when it's going to ship.
I'm not convinced that that changes anything, because niches by their nature do not scale well.
And I don't think that my cell phone company is going to start having live humans making $30 an hour answer 611 calls on the second ring, either.
The widening income gap has left a huge hole in consumer items, particularly durable goods. High end goods (ie durables that actually last) are many multiples of the price of cheaper goods. Somehow luxury and utility/durability have merged. If you don't believe me go try and buy a set of knives. Your choices are: a) bendy throwaway toys at walmart/target/whatever or b) half a paycheck at some kitchen boutique.
My policy now is that if something is supposed to last (and I can afford it or afford to do without it for a while) I make sure to buy well and buy once. It sucks though that I have to do so from brands and places that have outrageous markups though.
I hope one day people will realize that most executives (in publicly-traded companies) DON'T have the companies', the investors' or the employees' interests at heart. Most of these executives gained their position due to crafty manipulation and NOT by actually, really improving a product or product line, increasing profitability or market share. But they were and will be always great at presenting their (short or very short term) results in the best light possible, and excellent at knowing and manipulating the right people.
This breed of executives will outsource to poor countries (thus providing a short-term, fleeting increase in margins), lower salaries and/or fire employees at home (thus providing a short-term, fleeting increase in margins) and eliminate R&D and products/services (thus providing a short-term, fleeting increase in margins) - which will look good for a short while. Long enough to get a new promotion or a job at another company, after cashing in.
Please do yourself a favor and have a glance at this book.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
These $100k phone jobs aren't, "How do I plug in the VCR?" support.
As somebody else pointed out, It's collections and sales. That's a totally different beast from what most geeks think of as call-center.
These 6-figure people collect or sell 7-figures. They are not informing you that the router is down, or giving you the IP address for the mail server.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
What industry finds call center work so valuable that they can pay iQor enough to pay its employees so well?
Pretty much all of them. The only difference with iQor is that they are focusing their cashflow in a different way than the traditional model.
They are paying the people who directly create wealth instead of the risk managers who indirectly create wealth. Given that risk management (capital management, the executives) is becoming a rather boring and formulaic specialty, and that we recently proved that the "best" really aren't that much better at it (the bank collapse was a direct result of poor risk management), it seems reasonable to shift cashflow toward paying the direct creators of wealth and to get by with more state school BABMs and fewer Columbia MBAs.
Over the past 40 years in particular we shifted to the point of paying risk managers compensatory wages that exceed their wealth creation, while paying labor competitive wages that are vastly below their wealth creation. Perhaps that made sense when capital/risk management was a new, complex, and poorly understood science. What this company seems to be positing, and something with which I agree, is that capital/risk management is becoming formulaic, and so now a portion of the risk management compensation cashflow can be efficiently repurposed toward improving the quality of the product (hiring better communicators in this case).
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> Horrors are tens of millions of people with no right to healthcare, how can this even be up for discussion?
I agree, how can we even have a discussion about some mythical 'right' to healthcare? Hint: It isn't a 'right' if it requires the enslavement of someone else. Doctors and the rest of the healthcare industry are not required to serve you. You do not have a moral claim on their services.
This is the problem with all of the new progressive 'rights' they kee on inventing compared to real human rights. To illustrate, free speech is a fundamental Right possessed by every human being, regardless whether they live in a hellhole that oppresses them. But the right to speak does not give me the right to demand a printing press be given to me, it doesn't include the right to storm into a speech being given by someone else and demand a turn at the microphone, etc. It doesn't include an obligation on you to even listen to me. But Freedom of Speech does imply a right to listen/read whoever the heck you want to.
Regarding health care you have a Right to trade freely with anyone you can come to a mutually agreeable deal with. Any government that interferes with that right is oppressing you to varying degrees.
And there aren't tens of millions of Americans without health care. That is a lie invented by the progressives to try and scare us into doing something stupid. The number they throw around is usually 47M. An instant with Google gets this:
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The Breakdown
The largest, overlapping, groups of uninsured in the US include:
* 9,000,000 Millionaires
* 27,000,000 people who make more than $50,000 per year, but choose not to get insurance
* 22,000,000 Young adults who can afford insurance, but choose not to
* 14,000,000 People who can already get medicaid, but choose not to
* 11,000,000 Illegal Immigrants
* 23,000,000 People who are actually insured. That's right; you've been lied to...surprised?
This adds up to more than forty seven million, because of the overlap - for example young adults who are millionaires and change insurance companies fit into four categories, above.
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And anybody can walk into an emergency room and get care regardless of their ability to pay, that is Federal Law. Dumb perhaps but it is our current law. Of course since we don't have universal health care you can usually go to an emergency room and get to see someone before you die, unlike the routine horror stories coming out of the British press.
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