As of posting this, i have almost a year of experience being a BPO/ customer representative. Here are my findings

You are replaceable

Pretty sure that if you are an agent, even tenured, you are replaceable. You do not have privileges, unless you have someone you know in power. You might like what line of business you are, but nothing is set in stone. If people are needed to fill other line and you are not performing well in you current LOB, yeah, expect some gentle nudge from your Team Leader and Operations Manager about this. 

Schedule are your master

We have a schedule in our system. Everything is timed. Yes the work hours are timed, but so are your breaks. We abide by the schedule since we have an Adherence(atleast in the company i am working on) percentage. Your performance will be also based on how much adherence you made to your schedule. If your lunch time is at 4pm, you should be taking it at that time. If you have a chat right before your lunch, it will affect your adherence percentage, and most times, the human side of them would care about this. But that does not matter if they only see the numbers in the screen.

Distraction does affect how you perform

Positive thing that made me realize here in the BPO industry is that distraction is really easy to avoid if the distraction is far away from you. Since phones is prohibited in the production room and most websites are blacklisted on your computer, you will be focused on your customers. I noticed that I can go on chat with my customer for a long time without having the need to scroll on my phone even if I hid it in my pockets. For some reason, my brain was serious and wanting to work even when there is no queueing customers. 

When prepared, it becomes automatic

While it seems obvious, I do want to say that being prepared is different from other agents. How I be prepared is by saving the most common spiel I give to our customers so that all i have to do is copy and paste it when needed for faster reply, which help especially if we are queuing and my customer is an irate one, spamming “hello?”, and “are you still here?”. Being unprepared can make you panic and possible frequent in asking for help with your fellow agent, floor support and team leader. Not that asking for help in a bad thing, but it would look like you would need to be helped all the time, spending time asking for help, that could take a few minutes, that is supposed to be spent on replying with the customer who does not want to spend hours of their day stuck with you.

“Numbers dont lie”

Your Team Leader and the other higher can only judge you on your performance, and that is your survey scores and other metrics, like average handle time, how long do you take to respond to customer, and your percentage on how often you can resolve the customer concerns. If you had a bad survey from the customer, the team leader would review your chat to check what caused the survey to be bad. In some cases,there is something that the agent could have done to prevent this bad review, like being timely to reply, or being informative and show the customer that we know what we are doing. BUT there are also times were we do no have the control of the survey! Sometimes, we did our best, it seems that you have provided everything that the customer needs and wants, but since the customer has a negative opinion on the product of which you are representing, they left a bad review on your chat. When the team leader reviews the chat, they can either side with you that everything you have done was perfect and that this was no fault of the agent. Some would dissect your chat as much as possible just to justify the bad review, such as misspelling, even if the customer did not react to it, or being too wordy! It may seem a bit much but, you might experience this as well.

Expect changes

While in some line of business/LOB, everything is constant, more often than not, they are changes that would happen very fast. Things like information about a certain sale, or how we provide our assistance to our customer would change. This would probably be sent to you via your work email. From my experience, these changes are things like the knowledge base of the work, what troubleshooting steps would you do on their end, and providing information about our subscription or product that we have. Other changes are your work schedule, changing teams when assigned to a different work time, and even changing the line of business when needed. If your numbers say that you are not performing well enough on this type of service, you can be migrated to another line of service to train you again and hopefully this time, you have a good performance.

Abide by the rules, even how silly it is

There are some rules that we do not even think of that is a rule, dress code could be one, but I agree that there should be a limit as to what to wear. There might be some rules that would affect how you work. Limiting your resources for stricter policy can do affect how we perform and even though its a silly policy, we have to follow it if we want to stay on the job. Us humans adapt, so hopefully we can properly get used to it.

Your emotions are not needed, except the positive ones

No one really cares about your feelings, only a few ones does. After work, barely no one would care what you have told them that was embarrassing or something dire in your life. Best to keep it or share it to the people who you think would care or would keep it to themselves. There are some office politics that is happening that could potentially see you as a target when you share too much. Some are just happy that other people are doing worse than them. If you have a work bestie, feel free to tell them your current situation since you trust them, but not everyone that is friendly to you needs to know your personal life. 

Time spent does matter

I am talking about the time spent handling your customer. The vendors want a target time for you to handle the customer. Since this would mean that a faster service would be a good look in the vendor and a good time for the customer as well for the faster resolution, You have to fully make sure that you know what you are asking the customer about, have a pretty good idea what it is when the customer is rambling and you can know how to redirect the conversation to the concern at hand, and you should be able to follow the step by step action plan for you to quickly ensure to give them the right kind of ticket. Now if you are handling a lot of customers, this would affect your handle time. So you have to be ready to handle them even though it is unrealistic to handle 5 customers at the time, in chat. In call, expect that you do not have a break after a call, and expect some irate customer as well. In you break time, you have to be on point as well, even a minute you have overlunch, would ding you to the other department and possibly could be one of the metrics that you might be shifted to another shift. 

Just take your income and leave

If you just want to take your pay and go, you can definitely do that. I have been working in this bpo company for almost a year now and honestly, a lot of people do that. While I mainly just take my money and go, had some friends walk with us on our own ways, most of them do go outside and become real friends outside work. They go on trips and resorts for fun and it seems like that they are in this together. Creating a band of team strengthens their bonds as a small team, small family under this organization. This would probably make them a bit harder to leave the company since they have a support system within the office, which can also be a good way to destress and talk about something while working or in free time. But feel free to just keep your work just work as sometimes, you might even not like the team you are currently with.

Pick your wrongs

When you have a few months of experience in your company, you will notice that you can shortcut some parts of your work. For me, that is just straight up just telling them the troubleshooting steps that they would need to do for us to locate the nearest service center for them to visit. If they said the magic word, I will provide them with the proper resolution as fast as possible. Because that is what they need. You will have a method that might seem to be a different approach than what is recommended, but bear in mind that the policies change, and some rules that you follow might be recommended right now, but in a few weeks, some methods will be changed. Even if it seems wrong, as long as it is making your job easier, it would benefit your work and may even reflect better to your vendor.

If possible, use spare time for your own side hustle

In the moments where it seems that less customers are reaching out to you, you will have a dead air time and to just relax. Most of the time, you might be using this to talk with your mates, some even scroll in the internet while they have deactivated the company’s vpn. What I would like to do in these scenarios are to just read and probably learn something. I have been reading some self-help/self-improvement, and programming books on the side while I have a spare 5 minutes while no one is in queue or no one is replying back to me. A little reading would not hurt, and may help solidify what you are trying to learn. These bpo jobs would not be good for the long term since the stress might catch up to you, so learning something while at work could be beneficial when you need to create your own work.

Like every corporate-ish job, do not take this seriously

You will die, and that is a fact. If you do not like what you are working on, you can leave. I know that this needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Not everyone has savings and most of us have responsibilities that need money. But all I am saying is that if you can leave and the work is making you hate yourself and others, and even affects your health negatively, leave. I have seen people leave the company when times get rough, they do not like to handle the high frequency of customers coming to us, and I hundred per cent agree. I would leave these high frequency chats as well, but I am getting experience for a higher salary so that is why I am staying. I want to remind you that if it does not bring joy anymore or any meaning in your life, this work can be left behind and you can also take a break for even a week, and if you like, you can find another one. Hopefully less soul sucking and more soul blowing?

bonus: You will find camaraderie here

Especially when your customers are irate, you will bond over how the customer seems dumb, and stupid. Having something in common, something to complain about and the other person can understand it, it truly makes you feel close to the people around you.