Signs That You Might Lose Your Job in the Call Center Industry

Working in the call center industry could give you a fruitful career however in this industry we are also vulnerable to losing our job. During my 9 years stay in this industry I have encountered two (2) company acquisitions and one (1) employee lay off.

Listed below are some of the signs that I have observed before losing my job.

1. Too much avail time – We know that avail time is awesome because it’s one of the moments where we can relax and make ourselves free from stress however, too much avail time is a sign that you are about to  lose your job because less call means less revenue for the company.

Avail time is acceptable if it's a Holiday on the country where support is offered however, if you are working in a call center without calls then think again  because you are not working in the government sector where doing nothing is normal in most offices.

2. The calm before the storm – Before you get axed you would feel this silent treatment. The management seems to be silent because you are no longer invited to meetings and you will not be receiving important updates or emails about your work since they already know that you will be gone anyway. The management may seem to let go of your mistakes because they do not care about you anymore.

photo credit: Theophilos via photopin cc 3. Upper management managers are resigning or moving to a different post – The Company might announce that one of the directors have stepped down or have been replaced this is done because of failed targets. I could still remember a site director who moved to a different site without telling us the reason why he would move a week after the site was sold. I guess just like any other industry the information that we will get if something is being cooked from the backend would only be based on the amount of our pay check.


4. You are asked to train someone else – One of our authors was happy because he was tasked to train a class for a different call center company. Since we were working for an in-house site he felt that this might be the promotion that he’s waiting for unfortunately, all of our jobs were outsourced to the call center company that he trained a few months ago.

5. Less Promotion – If your company has been holding of promotion and the weekly monthly targets have not been met, chances are there might be planning to replace you or the account is about to be pulled out.

Usually Big multinational companies like Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase and Thomson Reuters would announce job cuts ahead of the actual date so that the employees may have time to look for new career opportunities, aside from that you could also get compensated once the layoff has been implemented.

On the BPO side I have seen instances where the agents like us can no longer login to our tools only to find out that the account has been pulled out. You might not see signs that the account will be pulled out, but the good thing is you could be assigned to another account however you might have to prove yourself again and worst the metrics will be totally different. You might just end up quitting your job because of the challenges that you will come across in hitting the new metric.

Don’t ignore the signs, though it’s easy to land a job in the call center industry especially if you are a tenured employee the big question is would the salary and benefits be the same or even higher than the previous employer? Well, most of the time it’s not especially if you were not pirated to join the new company. If we have missed some signs that you have encountered please leave it on the comments section so that we can have a fruitful discussion.