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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.
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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.
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
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.