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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.
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
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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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Practically all British GP's run their own businesses. There's nothing preventing them from operating entirely privately, and many do, but most strong to receive NHS payment to take NHS patients because it's well paid and takes all the billing issues out of the equation. A large chunk of British hospital employees also offer private services. Many of them in NHS hospitals, using spare capacity that they can get access to at a low cost, benefitting both them and the public who get some of their hospital costs offset by private providers that way.
Certainly none of them are being forced or coerced, and clearly I must be misguided seeing as I don't know of any countries that force people to become doctors and then force them to work for the public. But I guess that doesn't fit with your fantasy world.
All rights are human inventions. To pretend otherwise is meaningless.
And all rights are meaningless without at least the possibility of having the means and ability to make use of them. First and foremost that means actually staying alive and in good health. Any society that insists on caring about human rights that doesn't also take steps to ensure that everyone has a recent shot at good health is just plain taking the piss.
This is not a *new* idea - it's an idea that is well over 160 years old, gaining ground starting with the first socialist ideologists, and one that has been penetrating further right in the political landscape ever since (i.e. look at Europe where the vast majority of conservative parties no also staunchly support the concept of a *right* to a level of basic welfare).
You must be reading different stories from the British press than what they actually publish in Britain. As it stands here, anyone can go to an emergency room and be guaranteed treatment here too, but we don't because the vast majority of us get more than good enough treatment by going to our GP and get referred.
People who are not satisfied are perfectly free to get private health insurance - it's available and *cheap* since they only provide cover above and beyond services where they know they don't stand a chance of competing with the NHS.
I would say that personal liberty/freedom extends so far as not to infringe on an other person's rights. Lets assume we have the following rights... The right to live, the right to property, the right to defend one's life and property. All other rights can be considered secondary to these very basic rights. The right to travel is based on the right to live. The right to speak is based in the right to defend oneself and property. Personal freedom should extend so far as not to infringe on the rights of someone else. Law & government can be seen as those conditions where individual wants and needs overlap, and restrict the absolute extension of life and property.
Basically, I like to break things down into rights, needs, and wants. I should further state that I don't consider "intellectual property" to be property in terms of a "right" I consider it a want. Everything else pretty plainly fills into these categories which work out pretty well.
I find it ironic when people consider wants as "rights" where they infringe on another person's actual rights. ie: the want of a smoke-free environment outweighing a business owner's right of property (their business establishment). Yes, you can argue that smoking is a danger to one's health, but it isn't an immediate danger, and there is no restriction on a person to leave a smoking establishment. I only use this as an example here because it's probably the best example of this case. I don't like smoking, and wouldn't encourage it, however what someone does in their own property isn't the place of the government to regulate beyond an eminent danger such as poison, rotten food, etc.
I think people could get along a lot better if there were far less government intervention, and far more common sense over issues that should be relatively simple. And to the detractors against a free market, bear in mind that unionization, protest, and other means of rallying as a collective group are natural parts of a free market, as are loss and failure. Also bear in mind that globalization is not the same as a free market... you cannot trade freely with another party/group/country that does not trade freely.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
The fact that people have to pay at all to get any kind of healthcare is just shit. Countries with universal healthcare don't "force" doctors to treat you. Doctors choose to work in whatever hospital they want, or open their own practice or quit and play the stock market or become a plumber... just like any other job.
All countries I lived in also had free universal healthcare, I went into the hospital several times as a kid with a broken arm or leg, got treated and walked out without even a mention of billing, payment insurance cards or anything like that. My brother stayed in hospital for 15 days and didn't pay anything. My partners mother had breast cancer, and not only was she treated within 1 day of being diagnosed (during a free annual visit), but all the surgery was free and even the reconstructive cosmetic surgery was free (this was in Finland btw).
In the 21st century, universal healthcare IS a right, especially in the developed world. It's not a matter of being left or right. There's absolutely no reason a government should allow its own people to have substandard access to healthcare.
It really shits me when I hear people talk about "death panels" and "forcing doctors" to work in hospitals without understanding f all about the concept of modern socialism. Oh no!!! socialism! nooooo we're all going to be enslaved! sent to the gulags! USA.. USA...USA
The fact is that the government already runs many services - Cops, firemen, the army, FBI, CIA and any number of federal agencies. Would you like to privatise those also? "somebody is robbing my house... come quick" "I'm sorry sir, that item is not covered by your Security Provision Policy... for only 13.50 extra a month we could add it on. It becomes effective after only a 40 day waiting period - subject to eligibility"
Sure people complain about public health systems in W. Europe, but protesting about stuff makes (good)governments do things about it.
The plain fact is that the US spends more on healthcare than anyone else and still has lags far far behind other countries.
All this crap about not supporting the poorest people because that's the capitalist way - bullshit... the only reason they rich can afford healthcare is by keeping the rest of you on minimum wage. Health care affordability isn't exactly skewed to the lower end of the income bell curve is it? If you were sick, would you rather get treated according to how sick you were or according to how much your policy allowed them to treat you?
I'm all for capitalism and small government, but up to a point. Certain things NEED to be handled by government (law&order, military, health, infrastructure) otherwise it becomes a shitfest with the lowest bidder building stuff to appease the lowest common denominator, interested only in todays profits rather than the betterment of society (and by extension the nation - the whole reason for the government to exist)
People are talking about freaking internet access being as fundamental as water and electricity - don't you think healthcare should take priority over that?