Call centre staff to be monitored via webcam for home-working ‘infractions’ | Hacker News Reader

Call centre staff to be monitored via webcam for home-working ‘infractions’

theguardian.com

Wow, that's one of the books in term of double-speak: "the webcam system was intended “to respond to the overwhelming concerns of isolation, lack of team engagement and support, not seeing anyone from one day to the next, raised by those who are at home”."

Sometimes, I'm really impressed at PR firms ability to think that the rest of the world is idiotic and will take their statement at face value.

It's a pity that call centers are treated as dead end job and that we have companies pushing for those conditions because a good CS experience does completely change customer satisfaction and is worth cultivating. The race to the bottom with call centers is a very myopic way of treating one's customers.

A customer reaching a call centre is basically a "everything else failed" moment, a moment that is very expensive as 1 on 1 human help costs a lot of money. If you are going to invest, you invest in making sure people don't need to call.

> making sure people don't need to call.

Almost every IVR I have ever used makes me believe business invest in making sure people can't call or at least have a very hard time reaching a human.

Amazon makes it so easy to get help from a human that they call you...

I'm reminded of a policy of the southeastern US grocery store chain Publix: if there's a pricing error, the item is free. It will probably come as no surprise that pricing errors are extremely rare there.

When a company creates a significant incentive for itself to get an aspect of its business right, it will probably get that aspect right. I don't think I've ever wanted to call Amazon on the phone, and nearly every issue I can recall has had a satisfactory solution within their UI.

This rule is basically standard in supermarkets in Australia even though not legally required. In my life I have only once noticed a pricing error.

> nearly every issue I can recall has had a satisfactory solution within their UI.

They started shipping me books bound tightly in bubble-padded manila envelopes. The binding was so tight that the books arrived with damage caused by Amazon's own stupid packaging choice. I repeatedly returned these books with the explicit note "book was damaged due to bad packaging; please use different packaging". They were not capable of fixing their problem.

You assume enough customers complain to make it worth changing.

One is enough, if your definition of "worth changing" refers to profit margins.

> I'm reminded of a policy of the southeastern US grocery store chain Publix: if there's a pricing error, the item is free. It will probably come as no surprise that pricing errors are extremely rare there.

I have never shopped at Publix, but I can't even recall being a victim of a pricing error in another grocery.

I think you may find that pricing errors in grocery chains are extremely rare, period.

I've experienced numerous pricing errors at Walmart. You could argue that Walmart belongs in a different category, but a large part of their business is groceries.

I've experienced one pricing error at Publix having shopped at them for the better part of two decades. My item was, indeed free and the cashier sounded excited to be able to use the policy.

> if there's a pricing error, the item is free.

I love Publix, but I think this is marketing blargh. They once had a cuisinart dish marked with a $9.99 price tag so I bought it. The cashier rang it up as $199.99 and I brought it to her attention. She brought over a manager who said it was an error in labeling and should have been marked down to $99.99 and they would honor the intended sale price.

I mentioned the policy and she shrugged and asked if I want it or not. I declined and she put a new price tag on it at $99.99.

There was only one item and it was in the deal section. This is my only experience of Publix being lame in decades of use. Really surprising. This was also the only pricing error I’ve ever encountered.

It's more than that. The bulk of your support time for a typical consumer business, if you allow it, will be taken up by people who are lonely, mentally ill or extremely upset and want to express themselves to someone face-to-face.

These people are much easier to ignore via email, and almost no consumer problem actually requires an immediate verbal response.

Outside of certain niche applications like banking or B2B, I have no idea why most businesses offer call centres at all.

He he, except for the Italian incumbent energy company, where the only avenue is a Call Centre, even for complex cases... but it’s obviously a strategy to wear you down and give up on your complaint.

Despicable

I once worked with a national Telco company on their support system, their ideal situation was to have nobody calling in, so they did everything they could to try and stop that.

Self help guides for everything, step by step guided assistance pages, report nearly everything online, push out updates before people start to call in etc

Having people answer the phone gets expensive very quickly

How employees are treated are how customers will be treated.

How employees are treated are how customers will be treated.

I don’t think there is evidence for this, there are plenty of counter examples of businesses that treat customers well and workers badly. Any luxury goods business will fawn over its wealthy clientele while literally having slaves in sweatshops doing the work for example.

“Customer is king. Employees are serfs”

That's the kind of thing businesses tell customers, so they don't realize they're being conned. Employees may be serfs, but the customer is not their lord.

I don't believe that they think the rest of the world is idiotic. They just know that once they apply their thin veneer of spin, no-one is able to call them on their bullshit, and there'll be no consequences for their lies.

What other reasons would nobody be able to "call them on their bullshit"? Is it because they are the ones with a platform?

What reason does applying a thin veneer of spin work, except for that people are mostly suckers for it?

Most times "calling out" someone in a way that's effective takes effort. I think they're just giving the majority of people an excuse not to bother engaging in any activism that might actually work.

Right. Your choices are to say the truth, say nothing, or say some complete BS, or some gradient between these. There's no reason not to go for the BS. If you say nothing, that's slightly suspicious, or leaves a gap for someone to say something in your place. Obviously being bald-faced about your practices has no or almost no advantage. If you go fullBS, people at minimum have to knock down your statement, which takes energy, and then there is at least the appearance of a two sides dynamic. Journalists tend to like to cover stories holding up any two sides dynamics (these guys said this, the other guys said this), as it's safer to them, so there's even a good chance your BS will get parroted. Finally, saying some party line BS makes it easier to determine who's with you and against you. Allies can coordinate around your BS and repeat it, and the more BS your BS is, the more signaling value that has. You always need a party line, even and perhaps especially if you're up to no good and it's transparently false.

> Sometimes, I'm really impressed at PR firms ability to think that the rest of the world is idiotic and will take their statement at face value.

Yep. Trouble is, it works. Most of the time for most of the people.

... you probably don’t realise how much “news” you consume daily was actually fed to you via a PR department

I agree but I think the race to the bottom issue is more an expression of the outsourcing business model.

Companies that can afford to operate their own CS portals will outsource because they know they can squeeze these providers for cheaper services and in turn the employees ultimately are the ones that suffer.

I run a small business in India, and it horrifies me as to how badly call center employees are treated. I use contractors all the time and I just set the goals and measure outcomes at intervals of a week. I’ve never found micromanaging a poor performer to improve performance and it definitely pisses off high performers. If your employee is not performing and doesn’t improve with coaching, then just move on and find someone else. Don’t make your employee miserable with this sort of surveillance.

I could not agree more! If you can't trust an employee to do a good job, then why are they employed?

Often they aren't, they are employed by the lowest biding subcontractor you could find. Perhaps because when they implement stuff like this and it surfaces in newspapers you can just fire that company or claim that you "had no idea that people where forced to work under such degrading conditions and the subcontract will receive a stern talking-to.

The business logic behind the current call centre model is extremely flawed, it basically boils down to: We really don't want people to call, but sometimes they have to, how do we make that call as cheap as possible.

Business seem completely blind to the fact that when customers call, then it's because something has gone wrong. This is when you need competent and happy people answering the phone. Instead that call is seen as a stand-alone expense, which needs to be kept as low as possible.

In reality the call centre costs should be minimised by fixing the reason for the call. Thing to keep call costs down by hiring increasingly cheaper labour and trying to keep employees in check by implementing immoral business practises just results in increasingly unhappy customers.

It seems this kind of approach is popular in fields where no one actually wants to do the job. Being a telemarketer sounds is a shit job 99% of the time.

The only company I know of who claims to use the trust and motivate approach to this kind of job is Zappos.

FWIW, this isn't really any different from what goes on in regular call centers. I've visited some in the Philippines, and breaks are minutely regulated, personal phones are not allowed, bringing food or drinks to your desk is strictly forbidden, and the tables are laid out in tight ranks so they can easily be supervised by roaming supervisors. It's all about the KPIs, and there's a constant battle between the agents trying to game theirs upward and management trying to squeeze more work out of people, while simultaneously trying to hit their own targets and extract more billable hours from the client.

Some restrictions are sensible - for example call centers which routinely collect credit card information must reduce the surface area by which an employee can extract data from the facility. Same for content moderation gigs where the content also cannot be extracted.

Yes they should pay more and treat there employees better but don’t act like the average consumer does not support many of these provisions.

> reduce the surface area by which an employee can extract data from the facility

Is that what they must do? A software engineer at a FAANG could exfiltrate 1000x more data with their skills and their privileged access. I think they should be treated like call center employees.

But the FAANG employee has a lot more to lose. By getting fired, they could be loosing $200,000+ at a minimum. A call center employee typically makes maybe $30,000 per year, if that.

This would be a great anecdote if companies handling sensitive data weren't using contractors that get paid about as much as those call center workers...

At which point malice isn't even required to start losing private info to breaches

You have it backwards. The call center employee doesn't have a savings, misses rent, gets evicted and their kids taken away. The FAANG employee has a fat fucking savings account, and can live comfortably for at least 6 months while casually looking for another job.

Well, if you’re caught stealing from your employer good luck finding another job, and keeping those savings from the lawsuits coming down on you.

Many tech companies completely fail to do any kind of background check. It's easier to become an administrator at Reddit then it is to become a gas station clerk.

The FAANG employee is in high demand and therefore has implicit leverage, the call center employee does not. Whether one thinks they should or not does not matter, because the economics won’t allow it.

The amount of money needed to get a FAANG employee to exfiltrate data is by far higher than the amount of money needed to get a call center employee to exfiltrate data. That lowers the attack probability significantly since the payout must be a lot greater.

So looking/acting like a sweatshop is just a coincidence?

I worked for a call centre in Canada that had all the same rules.

I worked in two different call centers in eu and it was the same. They can afford treating employees like that because there will always be another student with no money waiting to take the spot of anyone who inevitably quits in a year. Not sure how to solve this, but it definitely feels dehumanising working there.

the difference is that they're policing somebody's own home, not company premises

Is there any actual advantage business advantage in being so draconian or is it just spiteful? Like my cushy programming job has made me soft but why not just measure performance by their actual performance? I can go to the bathroom or make a pot of coffee whenever I want, and I suspect the happiness that brings increases performance.

Talking out of my ass here because I don't know either, but maybe in these kinds of jobs, happiness doesn't really increase performance. If your job is 90% just reading out the FAQs page to customers or handling the exact same problem 50 times a day, its probably more an automatic process that the longer you sit at your desk, the more calls you are able to process and when your job has such a large supply, the contracts go out to whoever is cheapest.

Having worked in a call center myself at one point, I'd say the primary difference is the directly-customer-facing nature of that work. When a call comes in (and there are often a large number of simultaneous calls) someone has to be there at their desk to receive it - whereas with yours and my current gigs, the worst that'll happen is some production issue with a reasonable SLA.

In line with their company name they should call them telescreens.

On a more serious note, that kind of work environment attracts people who don't give a sh** about the company's goals. Highly motivated people just don't need supervision on that level.

Everybody involved knows these are dead-end jobs. Turnover of over 100% per year is common, and it turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy of everybody being treated like disposable peons.

How can turnover exceed 100%? The entire staff are replaced multiple times in a year?

Yes, exactly.

>attracts people who don't give a sh* about the company's goals

Whereas otherwise someone would apply to follow their dream career at a call center?

Of course they do, it's dead-end jobs, paying shit, that only people pressured to make ends meet ever apply to.

That's with monitoring or not.

And that's what makes monitoring both worse and applicable: because many of those people can't just quit...

Highly motivated people generally don't apply to these jobs, and those that do don't stay for very long.

Motivation is not what their employers are optimizing for, # of tickets solved / hour and # of upsells sold per day is.

Working in a call center is the most dehumanizing and abusive white-collar job that's still legal in the West. The company goals are to extract maximum number of billable hours from their clients at minimum costs. People are expected to burn out after few months and leave. It's a job that's taken only by either young and naïve, or when your only other alternatives are illegal and/or... icky.

1 year later...

"Teleperformance experiences significant attrition due to hostile surveillance of WFH personnel; struggles to hire replacements."

I wouldn't be so sure, I imagine the physical call centre wasn't really much different.

While this is correct, surveillance in the physical call center wasn't physically taking place in these people's homes, which IMHO is the critical difference.

Sure, because the call center was your workplace. Now your home is your work place and the rules have changed.

And to be clear I don't particularly believe this methodology is ultimately good for anyone; either the consumer, call center staff, or the company who's call support has been outsourced.

Unlikely I believe.

Call centres may be essential but people working there are cogs easy to swap.

Unfortunately call center employees don't usually have a choice, no one works in a call center because they like the job.

  10:28 INFRACTION: Bathroom break exceeds allowance
  11:32 INFRACTION: Reduced level of attention/engagement detected
  11:40 INFRACTION: Unauthorised nose picking

    12:01 INFRACTION: Excessive respiratory activity
    12:04 INFRACTION: Unapproved hydration
    12:11 INFRACTION: Disallowed leg shaking
    12:18 INFRACTION: Forbidden exasperation/FML alert

  12:43 INFRACTION: Excessive clicking of the right mouse button
  12:44 INFRACTION: Unauthorized single digit gesturing
  12:45 SECURITY VIOLATION: USB Webcam offline
  12:46 SECURITY VIOLATION: Company property disconnected
  12:48 SECURITY VIOLATION: Improper disposition of company property
  12:52 Are you still there? Target Lost.
  12:53 Sleep mode activated.

This makes me think of Apple, who outsource a big chunk of their Apple Care support to Teleperformance. They are also famously trying to tout privacy as one of their core values. Of course neither Apple nor Teleperformance are going to comment on whether Apple Care support agents are exposed to these bullshit privacy violations, but it wouldn’t be too hard to figure out.

On this subject, the politics of the call center: https://www.harrowell.org.uk/blog/2012/01/21/the-politics-of... / https://www.harrowell.org.uk/blog/2012/01/21/the-politics-of...

"Asymmetric legibility" is a good phrase for this.

Says it all when you read the companies response to this story...

> adding that it was “extremely disappointing” the media had been alerted and that this was considered gross misconduct

If this is the only way a company can gauge individual performance then they are doing it wrong

In general, call centres are doing it wrong. I'm sure there are some exceptions, but I've never seen a call centre that isn't toxic and hostile towards their employees.

Call centers are what race to the bottom looks like when it's approaching the finish line.

Plenty of these systems have caught some focus the past year. A different question might be - why do developers not say no to work on this type of software?

There always will be someone to deliver a product. Why are there engineers developing weapons systems even though they know human beings will be killed by their creation...? The salary is raised until someone is willing to do that job for the offered money.

No job is worth this level of discomfort and intrusion. I really hope employees quit in mass if this is implemented.

Ridiculous. If you are gonna have a webcam for this then why not make it automatically mark you as away if you step away from your desk rather than warn your supervisor that you did not click ‘break mode’ first. Stupid.

You really shouldn’t expect software employed in a call center to be designed to be easy or convenient for the people working there.

You can record a footage of you at the desk and then loop it.

RMS was right. Again.

This has zero to do with open source.

I suppose that is one way to get the remote-first evangelists to desire being back in the office again.

It is a call center job. When employees work from office they're being monitored just as strictly.

Yes. They are. In a place that's owned by their employer.

Being monitored like this in your own home is downright insulting.

I see a business opportunity for somebody here: AI software to counter AI surveillance software.

Surely there are more task focused performance metrics.

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