Our car wouldn’t start this morning due to the severe weather in northern Britain.  I rang the breakdown service I’m enrolled with and I was on hold for 22 minutes due to the call volume.  Now did I moan at the lady in the call centre no I didn’t, it wasn’t her fault it was -8c and many motorists were stranded (Britain doesn’t do cold weather very well as we are not used to freezing conditions)

This mornings episode reminded me of the five years I have spent in call centres based in the U.K.  I was registered with a job agency in Derby, I received a call one day from my agency, my contact told me of a job with a company called “Warranty Holdings” was avalible and maybe it would suit me?

The job was a “Technical support officer” Warranty Holdings at the time (2002) was the largest aftermarket warranty provider in the U.K. The company was owned by Ford.  The company had a 71% market share.

The job role entailed me supervising non-technical members of staff in the Warranty Holdings incoming call centre. The majority of the staff were female (Including my soon to be Fiancé) the call volume we handled was 900 to 1,200 calls per day!  The average call centre employee at our branch was supposed to take 60 to 80 calls a day.

The calls could be very technical indeed, they included all mechanical aspects of the breakdown Warranties, this included engine rebuilds and gearbox rebuilds, literally every aspect of a car except bodywork.  If a warranty claim became too technical for an agent to take I stepped in and called the garage back and delved into the technical aspects of the claim.

I was fortunate at the time to be able to call customers back and process the claim, where as the call centre agents had to deal with the claim on the spot.  The whole claims business was extremely stressful, if you can imagine your vehicle breaks down and you only have a contact to an agent who perhaps is on the other side of the country.  Tempers often became frayed!

If a claim was rejected for any reason customers often became abusive and very personal.  On one particular occasion I had to reject a claim on a Subaru gearbox, the gentleman had broken down in Ireland with the loss of all gears except 2nd unfortunately the reason for the rejection was driver abuse, he had been towing a huge caravan way over the towing weight for a small Subaru, and this had caused the gearbox to fail.