A day in the life of a call centre agent

It has been a long, difficult day. But it’s to be expected. It’s the weekend – the busiest time for the National Emergency Contact Centre (NECC). Vehicle crime ramps up over the weekend. Criminals take the opportunity to cash in on people driving around, parking outdoors and their carelessness from drinking.

It seems like the phone has been ringing non-stop, with calls from customers and the team in the Monitoring Contact Centre (MCC). Add to that the Teams messages, talking with the Law Enforcement Liaison Officers (LELOs) via the two-way radio and monitoring the vehicle tracking systems. Her job requires a lot of multitasking.

She missed her tea break. She was recording details from a customer who called in to report their loved one as missing. He was not answering his phone, and had said some things before he left home that had his family concerned. The closest LELO was immediately dispatched to the vehicle’s location.

She takes another call. “Tracker Emergency, how can I care for you?” A car has been stolen from a shopping centre parking lot. The caller is upset. She consoles her while asking the four legal questions to activate the vehicle recovery process.

The team has also had to activate for a car stolen from the parking area outside a sports stadium. At first the customer thought he just couldn’t find his car. He had left the stadium from a different exit and was a bit confused about where he had parked his car. But once the team guided him to the car’s location, he got there to see his car being driven away.

She’s had to handle a couple of verifications, where they check that a customer is safe because the car is unusually in an area marked as high risk and the customer is not answering their phone. In one case it was members of the media who were busy filming for a story.

It’s a lot of activity and a different kind of difficult from her previous positions. She has worked her way up in the call centre environment, from outbound sales. There are a lot of rules to remember and minimal time to interact with the customer to complete a sale or to keep them as a customer. You have to make every effort to build a great connection with a customer on a short call of around three minutes.

She’s dealt with a lot of rude or difficult customers. Those customers who will argue with or challenge you, ask to speak to the manager, or threaten to take the matter to the media or on social media. But it’s about sensing a customer’s mood and using that feeling to alter your interaction with that person to ensure customer satisfaction.

That intuition is one of the reasons she finds herself where she is today. Her ability to think on her feet, be a good listener, use the resources at her disposal to resolve issues quickly and her positive outlook got her here. She’s also level-headed in a crisis – someone once described her as having a calming voice.

Whereas in the past a tricky situation was trying to explain English business terms to a customer that speaks a different dialect, now the customer on the other end of the line could be in danger. It requires a greater level of empathy.

She enjoys the work that she does. She knows that each day what she does makes a big, meaningful difference. Particularly for the customers she has to speak to. Each one of them is facing a challenging situation, which many of them have never had to deal with before.

Just as she is leaving her shift, she hears that the LELO found the missing man. He located the man’s car parked on the side of the road, but the man wasn’t in it. When he searched the surrounding area he found the man near a tree, with a rope around his neck. Through careful negotiations, the LELO successfully persuaded the customer to step away from self-harm and ensured his safety.

It was the team’s swift intervention that ultimately prevented a tragedy. She is proud to be working for a leading vehicle tracking company that puts care and protection into the heart of everything they do.