CRANK CALL

Riti Sen, a college student, was looking forward to a job on the side. The BPO sector was the most attractive option. The money was enough to buy her new clothes and to take friends out. All she had to do was attend calls. What she had not bargained for was the abuse that would become part of her working hours.

Riti’s callers were not from distant shores making racial comments or getting infuriated with the attendant’s “false accent”. Her callers were from in and around Calcutta, but the nature of their abuse was quite international.

Customer care executives in the domestic sector have to deal with no less hostility.

“One in every 10 caller is abusive. Handling irate customers is part of our job,” says Romi Roy, a customer care executive of the BPO section of IBM. Her job is to handle calls for a power company. “In case of a power-cut that stretches for hours, callers often lose their temper and start misbehaving,” she says.

The “misbehaving” can range from hurling expletives at the executive to threatening to beat them up or even get them fired.

“The hardest part is keeping your cool,” adds Roy. If a call centre worker snaps back, he may end up losing his job. “When a caller gets out of hand we can press a “crank call button”. Immediately a recorded voice informs him that he is being disconnected. The caller’s phone number is also recorded,” Roy adds. The records help, if action is taken against a caller. “Usually his calls are barred,” she adds.

Flirtation can turn into abuse too. “Some people call up only to flirt with the female callers. At times they demand to be connected to a particular person. Often they don’t even have a problem at hand,” says Indranil Choudhury, the operations manager of a BPO handling calls for a telecom service provider. Such callers can become persistent. The only way out then is to bar their calls, often after the fifth time.

But persistent callers keep calling from different numbers, adds a part-time BPO worker.

Under such trying circumstances, some BPO employees feel there’s a bias against men. “In some BPOs, a female employee is allowed to terminate an abusive call if the caller refuses to stop after a single warning , but in case of her male colleagues the call can be terminated only after three warnings,” says Saikat Das, a former customer operations manager of a BPO handling calls for a telecom bigwig.

Sometimes, customers are rude even when there’s no problem at hand. “In case of difficult customers, we transfer the call to a higher authority or just hang up. However difficult it is we have to stay calm,” says an executive of a helpline that provides information and phone numbers to callers.