Call centres have been a regular feature in India’s growth story and they have been around for almost 15-20 years.
A lot of youngsters have tried their hands at this job, some are still working and many of them have moved out. However, a call centre employee’s life always looks quite intriguing for someone looking at it from the outside. Is it exciting? Is it glamorous? Is it plain boring? What is it like?
Let me help you understand it a bit in detail.
There are primarily two kinds of call centres:
Domestic: These cater to Indian population based in India and these cover everything right from your phone service providers to banks to e-commerce companies.
International: These have the same profile except that they provide similar services to the international customers based in different countries.
Advantages of Call Centre:
- If you happen to work in a domestic call centre, you deal with people speaking your language, sharing your culture and you can relate to their thought processes.
- Working for an international call centre gives you a global exposure while sitting right here just by talking to varied customers with different mental and cultural mindsets.
- A lot of learning happens as far as human nature is concerned.
- If you’re young and ready to work double hard, then you can work in a night call centre, grab a few hours of sleep and then do some day-time part-time job or even attend college and finish your studies.
- The money is better than regular jobs in other industries.
Disadvantages of Call Centre
- The job requires you to sit throughout your working hours and speak on phone.
- The working hours, especially for international customers when you have to stay awake in the night and sleep during the day damages your biological clock temporarily.
- The potential for career growth is in the same industry and if you try to jump into some other industry for a day job, the money offered and positions offered would both be less compared to a call centre job.
- Health gets affected due to poor eating and sleeping schedules, but that can be recovered once you leave the job.
If you enjoy talking to new people from diverse backgrounds, which are very different from you then you’re going to love your job. Of course there are difficulties in understanding their cultural mindsets, accents especially with international customers, but eventually you start enjoying it and find it refreshing.
There are still a lot of negative perceptions about call centres. A lot of people still consider them as places of clerical jobs or offices that are not safe for women or places where all kind of morally-degrading activities happen. The truth is far from it though! A call centre is just like any other office just that works round the clock, is mainly dependent on youngsters and has a work-culture alien to typical Indian mindsets. Since it is youth based, it comes across as a place where the youth rebellion against the society is easily visible as far as dressing sense, social life and attitudes are concerned, but at the end of the day the companies who are hiring these youngsters are paying money for a job and they don’t take jobs lightly!
If you’re planning a job in a call centre, go for it, but just be ready for unusual work-timings. Rest is the same as in any other company.
Go and enjoy!
