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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.
1. Call centers are in the more depressed parts of the U.S. I have a sneaking suspicion the workers are happy-ish to be there, but aren't part of a healthy middle class.
2...U.S. employees universal health insurance. What kind? PPO. I'm tired of hearing this topline chant when the details of the policies are depressing.
3....and pays salaries and bonuses that are nearly 50% above industry norms. So, are the call center workers still the working poor?
4. The best of iQor's front-line call-center workers make more than $100,000 per year The best one serving an uber-tight niche. More spam.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
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
The CEO of this company was born in India!
I think it says something very nasty about U.S. corporate culture that it takes an immigrant the see value in hiring Americans.
I won't name names, but one of our competitors does this. The down side, they over-inflate their prices to the customers to compensate for 6 digit salaries for sales people. They are lucky to be in a business where they can pull this off because of the complexity of pricing, but as with any market, the margins get thinner and thinner and they just won't last.
What does this have to do with Sarah Palin?
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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They do outsourced customer service, ie support calls, not telemarketing. They also do collections, which I guess is pretty shitty work.
When you hear about these compensation packages the execs are getting, it makes you wonder how far that could stretch if divided equitably amongst the workers.
The sad truth is that people don't seem to want to pay more for quality, they'll only pay more for fashion. When Macs were sold based on their utility, they eventually lost out to the up and coming Wintel systems that weren't as good but were a whole lot cheaper. The Mac CEO at the time was advised to cut the price and he said "No, people will pay for quality." No, they didn't. Not enough of them. And Mac didn't really make a comeback until Steve Jobs made them sexy again, made technology dance to the same tune as fashion. Suddenly Apple is chic and cool and people are happy to pay ridiculous gobs of money.
Go figure.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
They moved their first call center out of Austin not because their employees were demanding high wages, but because they'd so pissed off everyone even remotely technical in town that they couldn't hire anyone in the first place.
The great thing about following Dell is at least you know you're going to go into bankruptcy really, really slowly. I guess that's a business plan.
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 that in 10 years a computer will be the new support representative. Then I can tell it how bad I hate the company it works for while not feeling bad about it...
Just don't tell it how you feel about Windows 8 :P
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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.
I know at IBM, most mainframe operators (including myself) made over $100k. It wasn't that hard. IBM just worked us to death, and paid us time and a half over 40. When you're working 12-hours a day 7 days a week (84 hours), the dollars add up ($27 RG, $41.50 OT). Add in the fact that I worked the night shift at the time, so I literally couldn't spend the money I was making. I left after a few years.
I imagine a call-center like this is counting those 6-figure salaries in the same way. They pay their top employees to work 70 / 80 hours a week.
Google the title. I agree that any company that gets a union deserves one.
pick any 3 letters
Are 'POO' and 'ASS' already taken?
The only problem with that theory is that the people calling in will be just as dumb and angry as ever, so even if the guy in the call center is great he probably won't see the massive increase in productivity that you would expect.
It seems to me that this company is the perfect "second tier" tech support line. The first tier being the guys in India who just go down the list regardless of what problem you have because 75% of the time it's the same dumb problem again and these guys get paid way too much to spend all day telling people what a mouse pointer is or how to double click.
I've always had the fantasy that if I owned a tech company that had direct contact with customers, that I would have two support lines. The first is right on the front of the support page and sends you to "first tier" support in India. They can escalate your call to second tier, but only after going through all of the easy fixes. The second tier support would have its number listed at the end of the FAQ/support database. People who went through the online support and still had to call would be send directly to the second level techs.
Of course I tend to have this fantasy every time I call tech support and are forced to go through everything their FAQ already covered that I already tried before they send me off to someone who can actually help.
I read the internet for the articles.
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.
Our cable company (Rogers) decided to bill us for a non-existent mobile phone account, apparently because the phone subscriber's last name and ours were similar. Spent months talking/fighting/threatening Rogers to get them to cease attributing these bills to us, and we finally succeeded.
Fast forward 6 months, and all of a sudden we're swamped with 5-6 automated voice messages daily (!) from Iqor. They'd obviously bought the bad paper and were trying to collect. I called them back and explained the situation, and the nice, reasonable, well-paid agent said they would clear it up internally and stop contacting us.
Fast forward another year, and we've only recently stopped being harrassed by these dirtbags. It was an unending litany of lies from their agents, off-hour calls, up to a dozen automated calls per day, etc., etc. Only when I asked them for all documentation pertaining to the alleged debt, their legal Canadian address where they could be served, and declared my intent to file suit and/or lodge complaints with every authority I could contemplate did they finally manage to stop the calls.
Rogers and Iqor - a fucking scumbag match made in heaven!
Even HP/Agilent have lost their way after the founders left. Back in the 50's-80's when the founders still called the shots they valued people (down to the janitors), treated them well, and fostered an environment that was aimed at excellence (i.e. you were inspired to keep up with your coworkers, not constantly dragged down to their level). Once the MBA's got in charge it has been steadily downhill.
The lure to cut costs vs. the hard to quantify benefits of nurturing employees through creating a rewarding work environement is one few business majors who have not come up through the ranks can appreciate. Sadly it feels like virtually all corporate cultures have succumb to the dark side.
I used to work 60 hour weeks happily, but having been outright screwed by too many MBA driven nickel and diming fiascos I no longer do. I work my 8 hours and go home, keeping my head down the whole time. I pour my creative juices into home projects instead of unrewarding work ones (3 industrial sewing machine actually come close to the fun of microwave IC design, who'd of thunk?).
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.
This whole offshore call center crap may, as a practical matter, push Congress too far one day. Which is to say, push (us, lower-case note) Americans who vote for cretins too far one day.
Sooner or later a power-hungry politician will come along and note, loudly and rhetorically, that some businesses are turning into giant wads of foreign money using computers and hirelings to harass Americans by phone call, from outside the country.
What happens then is anybody's guess. If I could insert an "eating popcorn" emoticon here, I would.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
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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All things considered, it does. I've done the call-center trenches, making barely more than minimum wage. Yeah, it does suck hard. However, I've always enjoyed helping people (I'm sick in the head I know) and I've moved on to a company that pays well (50k+benefits/bonus, got close to 60k last year) and I'm doing essentially the same job I started out doing (its more technically complex however) I LIKE my job a hell of alot more now that the company supports me as an employee. And I know it affects my job performance, and the support the companies customers receive.
No wonder companies are outsourcing if all USAsians think they have to be overpaid that much
What do Asians living in the US have to do with it?
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At the risk of losing karma...
Offtopic is actually correct in this case. If it was a Troll, it would be attempting to incite people to disagree with vitriol. That's clearly not the case. Just as clearly, it has nothing whatsoever to do with call center jobs (at least I hope it doesn't). Thus, offtopic.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
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.
Wow, so you just ignore the commonly accepted definitions of terms and apply them as labels to be viewed by everyone else.
Enjoy eating your dresser tomorrow morning before you head off to soap, it really is the most important shoe of the day!
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
Britain is only called England by ignoramuses. While the full details are complex (see ) the basics are that Britain is the combination of at least England, Wales and Scotland and Northern Ireland.
To equate Britain to England demonstrates that your "public" education (because in the U.K. that means something entirely different) was/is considerably lacking in geography.
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?