The Last Bullying Frontier

Bullying of LGBT youth has received well-deserved attention over the past months and raised public awareness about every other societal manifestation of bullying—except one.

There is one group that contends with bullying with alarming regularity and although no lives have been lost as a result, the psychological, emotional, and financial consequences of their bullying are staggering in scope. They are—call center representatives.

Call center representatives are the people who answer the phone when we call customer service or municipal hotlines to report problems, make complaints, or request technical support. They are entry-level employees who receive a few weeks of training before being deployed to the front lines of their industry where they encounter an impatient and highly aggressive public.

Many of us associate call centers with outsourced facilities in India or the Philippines but there are thousands of call centers across every state in our nation that employ hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens.

How Abusive Do Callers Get?

In doing research for my book, The Squeaky Wheel, I interviewed many call center representatives and heard many stories of terrible verbal and emotional abuse (the most dramatic of which is described in detail in Chapter 7 of the book). "People burst into tears here all the time," a woman at one call center said. "I was cursed at, called stupid, slow, moron, retard and idiot so many times a day—I cried myself to sleep every night." Why didn't she quit? She was a single mother and she needed the job.

Call center employees can average up to 10 hostile encounters a day in which they are subject to vile and personal insults, screaming, cursing, and threats. Imagine being treated abusively in your job numerous times a day, every single day.

While in-store employees can call security if a customer becomes threatening or belligerent, call center employees enjoy no such backup. They are required to stay on the line and "salvage" even the most abusive and hostile calls as best they can. Further, they are forbidden to "fight back" as responding in kind to such provocations can cost them their jobs.

The Bullying Power Dynamic

This grossly uneven power dynamic between a caller and call center representative is something of which we the public take full advantage. After going through automated menus or waiting too long on hold, we take out our anger and frustration on people whose job prevents them from fighting back-in doing so we are bullying them in every sense of the word.

What is striking from a psychological and sociological perspective is how common it is to hear otherwise decent people confess to treating call center representatives in a manner they would consider verbally abusive and reprehensible in any other context. In fact, we are so desensitized to the plight of call center employees, such stories are often related without a hint of remorse or recognition of the mental anguish the representative in question might have endured. In other words, we demonstrate a problematic lack of empathy (read "How to Test Your Empathy" here).

Why We Dehumanize Call Center Representatives

There are several reasons why we allow ourselves to bully call center representatives:

1. We tend to view them as literal representatives of the companies responsible for our frustrations and problems—thus we hold them personally responsible (even though they had nothing to do with our problem) and feel they are fair targets for our anger and frustration.
2. Never seeing their faces allows us to switch off psychological filters such as civility and empathy. As a result, we typically feel no remorse for our actions and have little sympathy for the plight of the call center employee who was subjected to them. In other words, we are in denial about the emotional and psychological distress our bullying might cause.
3. Our complaining psychology is such that we are convinced (often erroneously) the "company" will make it as difficult as possible for us to resolve our problem or get through to a live person. As a result, we get into a veritable battle mentality even before dialing the toll-free number.

The Consequences of Bullying Call Center Representatives

The impact of our bullying has severe consequences for call center employees as well as the industry as a whole. Call center representatives typically experience severe and chronic stress and have high rates of medical absenteeism, burnout, and depression. As a result, call centers have one of the highest employee attrition rates in any industry because few workers can manage our psychological and emotional assaults for long.

The annual costs to companies of having to regularly hire and train new call center employees can run hundreds of millions of dollars or more. The rapid turnover also creates a vicious cycle in which a chronic influx of new workers increases the likelihood of us encountering hesitant and inexperienced representatives, which then frustrates us and inflames our tempers even further (read "Complaint Handling: Why Companies and Customers Both Fail").

Bullying Essential Reads

School Bullies Earn More Money as Adults

Rewrite Bullying and Abuse With Therapeutic Journaling

Dehumanizing call center employees and treating them as emotional punching bags represents the kind of societal bullying that should be as intolerable as any other form of bullying we decry today. It is a behavior that causes staggering financial losses to companies and untold emotional and psychological ones to tens of thousands of our fellow Americans.

It is up to us as citizens and as consumers to acknowledge victims of bullying wherever they exist. Let's remind ourselves that call center representatives are there to help us and that treating them with respect and civility will make our encounters with them less frustrating for us, less painful for them, and more productive for all.

Copyright 2011 Guy Winch