Raise the bunting, unpack the spam sandwiches and pop the fizz! Next month representatives from call centres all across the UK will gather together in Glasgow for the industry’s annual jamboree.
The Call Centre Association’s National Conference is a two-day event with a packed programme of speakers who’ll be delivering their personal formulae for making call centres more responsive and ultra efficient.
But – drrrrrum rrroll, please! – the highlight will be the announcement of winners of the Excellence Awards, those coveted gongs handed out to individuals, teams and companies who have made their mark in 2015.
Some of the employers with vacancies on s1jobs.com are already on the shortlist but we’ll all just have to wait until the gala dinner on 25 November to find out who will carry off the top awards.
The Call and Contact Centre industry itself has a good reason to celebrate this year.
The big get-together comes just weeks after the sector rolled out its first ever degree.
Firstsource Solutions, which has sites all across the UK, has agreed a tie-up with Ulster University in a partnership believed to be the first of its kind anywhere in the world.
The three-year course is open to staff on the company’s management team and the first students will enroll this month, studying data analytics, recruitment, training, performance management, sales and IT.
Studying while you work might not be everyone’s cup of tea but this is a major step forward for an industry that has sometimes struggled with image and staff retention. Once upon a time, working in a call or contact centre was what you did to bolster your student union funds or fit in work around the demands of raising children – it was never what anyone grew up wanting to do for a living.
Now, however, as the business matures it is becoming less of a stop-gap solution and more of a career choice for motivated individuals with good communication skills.
From Information Handlers, Customer Service and Debt Solution Advisors to Inbound and Outbound Sales staff, around one million people are employed in the Call Centre Industry in the UK and Tim Moruzzi of Ulster University sees the new course as a way of eradicating high turnover and low morale.
“I doubt many people see call centres as a long-term career. They mainly see it as a way to earn money – but we want them to see a future in the industry,” he says.
If you too, see a future for yourself in call centres, s1jobs.com has the right vacancy for you, whether you are driven by sales targets or have the technical expertise to sort out consumer or connectivity problems for customers.
The work done is hugely varied – it can involve selling pensions and mortgages, dealing with IT problems, providing technical support to businesses or booking hotel rooms for clients from around the world.
In all of these jobs, an ability to think on your feet goes hand-in-hand with great communication skills.
And, you never know: get it right often enough and you could be rehearsing your own acceptance speech for next year’s Excellence Awards!
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