Day in and day out, call center agents (also known as help desk professionals) are placed
front and center in a grueling work environment, beset by grumpy, rude, unprofessional and
sarcastic callers. At the same time, these help desk professionals have to contend with
long work hours and having to rush to fill their daily quota. On top of this, they have to
follow every necessary company standard when it comes to operations protocol just to keep
their job and be regularly paid. This is why help desk remedy becomes important for
stressed-out agents.
Getting a job with a help desk company may be the easy part – it is the task of keeping it
as a regular day job (or night job – if you factor in mandatory graveyard shifts and
compulsory flexible working hours) which gives help desk professionals a headache.
What is it exactly that makes a caller become as rude as they can get when the help desk
staff answer their call? Even agents are tempted to ask the rude caller about this
sometimes. Can the caller possibly get even ruder, agents are probably just aching to ask.
Well, callers are often rude because of the product-related or service-related problems
they face that makes them feel frazzled and hassled. In turn, agents may react in an
offensive manner to the caller because they too are stressed everyday while at work. You
can rarely find callers on certain days who maintain a positive attitude. On those days,
they voice their grudges full steam into the ears of the poor helpless agent.
With all this stress that agents have to contend with at work, companies usually compensate
them well for the pressure of being help desk assistants by offering nice, even generous
benefits. Usually, in a big call center company, you will find good facilities that are
maintained just for their agents – facilities like a video arcade room, resting place, and
even a gym. Such companies pamper their employees with great health benefits, insurance,
dental care and of course the mandatory high salary. Their regular employees enjoy paid
leaves or vacation time as well.
Though all these are nice benefits for a person who works as a help desk staffer, it is
still a basic necessity to provide adequate training to these employees so that they can
keep improving on their level of knowledge and skills so that most (if not all) calls have
a happy ending.