Nightshift:call center agent’s blog

Exactly a year ago, I set my foot in a call center in Megaworld Building in Eastwood City, Libis in Quezon City. The first day of training was at 9 pm.

This is the first time that I met Joseph, Jovie, Dianne, Brian, Kim, Elaine and Frances. Our trainer was Geraldine. Our account then was special and simple, since it will only run until the end of December 2006. After that, we did not know what to expect. By the middle of December, we trained as customer service agents. We belong to Wave 32.

Our first lunch as a wave was in Something Fishy. In the next few days, we would buy our packed lunch in the late “hepa lane,” beside 7-11. The hepa lane, however, no longer exists to give way to the Megaworld development.

After one year in this call center, I have no plans yet of leaving. But that doesn’t mean all are beautiful.

Pros: people are warm and you can ask any agent or TL regarding the process and troubleshooting; holidays are also considered as overtime; not too strict English-only policy; cool manager and supervisors who interact with the agents.

Cons: (these are just my impressions. It may or may not apply to other employees) unprofessional workforce; you can apply for a vacation leave four months ahead and still be rejected; high absenteeism rate which leads to low avail.

The sad thing however, is my team leader since May has resigned and tonight will be his last shift. Tomorrow, he will leave for Singapore. I just wonder why all my former TLs, except for one, has left the company. TL Jak is now in Saudi, Liz has resigned for some issues with the agents and now Roman. For the meantime, a shift supervisor will take over until the new in-house TL comes.

There were 17 of us men in the team. I admit that I was intimidated by some members of the team but later on, I was able to laugh with them. The heck, when we were in the lean shift, they even made some tags in our workstations. Month after another, we were joined by two ladies.

Though my surname is really “Carigma,” Paul changed it to “Cariman” for some unknown reasons.

My team mate who is the wife of a police has this.

The following are some of the photos taken during our meeting two Sundays ago. Good thing it wasn’t queuing.