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Building a career in telemarketing
There are now over 1,000,000 people employed by call centres and telemarketing agencies in the UK. You have a great opportunity to build a successful and rewarding career in the industry and here is a few tips on how…
Firstly, it’s important to understand the difference between a call centre agent and a professional telemarketing consultant. Although it’s not true in all cases, typical call centres employ temp staff with a ‘Bums on Seats’ mentality. More often than not, the typical call centre agent is put through a crash course in telesales, a fast track lesson on the company they are representing and then thrown head first onto the phones. “Here’s a script and a phone… Go do some telesales!”. Those people are then representing a business. There are around 5,500 call centres in the UK and the average size of a call centre in the UK is 120 seats. So there is a lot of room for you to succeed if you are good. It also means a lot of room for you to manage teams and progress through various departments.
Within a typical call centre, there are always opportunities to progress. Any industry which has a high staff turnover will produce opportunities for promotion or the opening to move into other departments. Plus, with call centres, there are always new projects and new clients to work on. However, make an effort to remember that a lot of call centres have a high staff turnover for a reason. Sometimes it’s because they treat their staff as numbers, sometimes agents are underpaid, sometimes they don’t promote from within, sometimes they are very low quality roles and employees become frustrated and bored. We are all human beings at the end of the day. We like success, we like achieving, we LOVE recognition, we need security and we need the sense of belonging. If you are employed on a temporary basis or a weekly contract, will you get the same satisfaction? Staff turnover across all call centres sits at around 25%. That figure does include inbound and outbound call centres but you’re likely to find that outbound calling agents achieve a higher staff turnover unless they are a good. So be prepared to take the rough with the smooth. If you can push through the bad stuff in call centres, you’ll get to the good stuff.
