Always nice according to the guide

I urgently needed a job, so I came to the call center. My job was to bring financial products to the people for banks. At first it wasn't bad at all. After a while, however, I got bored of basically working through the same guide over and over again. According to the motto: I say A, and depending on what the person on the other side says, I continue with B or C.

There is a separate guide for each product. Everything you can say is in there. For example, I was advertising for a private pension plan and I was supposed to say, "You can start with just a little money." And it was recommended that I scare people a bit by saying, "If you're a woman, your pension probably won't be enough, right?" That's particularly good to say as a man.

The guide for each product is taught in a training course via an interactive training platform. You also learn how to respond to objections, i.e. how to convince people on the phone to stop by a bank branch, even if they have already said that they are not interested in a new account. So it was a platform with gender-appropriate language that is common in corporations, where people learned: “No doesn’t mean no.”

Otherwise, the language! The products are always somewhat disguised. You don't say "private loan", but rather "financial flexibility". You don't ask: "Do you want to come to the meeting with your advisor?", but rather: "When do you have time, in the morning or in the afternoon?" That has a slight tendency to push back.

It didn't take long for me to realize how counterintuitive the work was. For example, I should call people about a personal loan. They were selected by the bank based on statistical data. It was probably mainly customers who were stuck in the overdraft. However, the personal loan that I was supposed to sell to them was almost as expensive as their overdraft facility and much more expensive than at other banks. Then your own power of persuasion disappears.

Given this, I was surprised at how rarely people became unfriendly. Of course, some people were upset when I told them on the phone that their account fees were going up. And someone was once really angry because he was called several times in just a few days because of a technical error, even though he had asked to be left alone the first time. But I can't confirm the horror stories you hear about being constantly yelled at in the call center. Some surprisingly nice things have happened to me, for example when I was talking to someone for 20 minutes about the fact that they thought I used the filler word “actually” too often. You make phone calls like that if you get involved in them.

As meaningless as the work often was, it was never particularly strenuous. A program that automatically dials phone numbers took care of the calls for me. It can happen that no one answers the phone for a long time. And I always used the time between phone calls to read – not just novels, at some point I was also able to concentrate on specialist literature. On my best day, I made five phone calls in my six-hour shift.

I think it's a shame that the job is so absurd, even though it doesn't have to be. Because sometimes I have had meaningful conversations - for example, recommending a consultation appointment to people whose building savings contract or savings account was about to expire. Or I helped people who didn't speak German very well open their accounts in English and explained to them whether the account they signed up for was the right one for them or not. After such phone calls you have a good feeling and think: “I was a bit helpful.” But those remained the exceptions; the job is designed to sell products.

This is extremely noticeable at the moment. Some of my colleagues now have to make cold calls. They call people whose data they have from partner companies and try to talk them into credit cards over the phone. Sales are increasingly replacing advice. Luckily I don't have to do that myself anymore. I made the jump in time and now work in a different department where I no longer have to make phone calls.