Call center jobs are coming back to the U.S.
If you’ve ever called a customer service line, you’ve likely talked to someone in India, the Philippines, or Mexico. Now, some U.S. companies are bringing their call centers home and changing the way they do business.
Have you ever been stuck in a phone tree so long you just lost it and started ranting on Twitter?
“In a call center, somebody’s calling to talk to you. In social media, somebody is talking about you,” says Paul Stockford, research director at the National Association of Call Centers.
Stockford says the industry has been growing in the U.S. since 2008, and more than half of contact centers here now have social media programs.
Kymberlaine Banks is a social media program manager with Telvista, which runs contact centers in Mexico, but also in Texas and Virginia. Her “small but mighty” stateside social media crew monitors the web for complaints.
“They’re reaching out to people who are saying, ‘You suck, you failed, you whatever,’” she says. “It is not a happy thing.”
She says social media representatives need more writing and problem-solving skills than people who answer phones. It’s a different skill set because they also respond to positive comments.
“If someone says, ‘I love you,’ we say, ‘We love you, too,’” Banks says.
General Motors brought back a number of customer service jobs from Argentina last year.
Just don’t call them “call center” jobs. Now, the catch phrase is “customer engagement.”
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