What is the career path in a Call Center

What is the career path in a Call center?

The call center industry has been in vogue amongst the youth, especially in metropolitan cities in INDIA. Youth consider a call center job the best way to Earn and Learn because this industry offers decent wages along with lucrative incentives while you can continue your study. Most of the college-going students work night shifts as PTE (Part-time employees) for call centers to cover the cost of their studies.

What is the career path in a Call Center

As per the survey (done in a few of the call centers of Delhi/NCR) reports, the average age of a customer service executive is 20 years. But most of the youths bid adieu to this industry after 3-4 years because they do not find a fruitful career path in the industry or sometimes due to an imbalance in work/life balance

In addition to the aforesaid reasons, there are certain other myths about the call center industry which makes an employee reluctant to continue for a long run

Having experience of more than a decade now let me give the honest answer to this question of "What is the career path in a Call Center?" and also what are the different departments in which you can make a career along with the minimum eligibility criteria

Let's start with the foundation :

Customer Care Executive: Every individual starts his/her journey in the call center industry with a call center executive level.If you perform well and stay loyal to the organization you can see a good career path in the next few months or years. Needless to say, an individual's behavior and commitment towards the organization plays a key role in building a career and to be honest even more than an individual's performance.

Every call center rolls out IJP on a regular basis in which an internal employee can apply for the job post . This IJP is for the various departments which will be discussed further. But one thing to keep in mind is that every call center has minimum eligibility criteria in terms of tenure spend in the organization. For most organizations, a candidate should spend a minimum of 6 months before applying for IJP (Internal Job Posting).

Some common criteria to apply for IJP are :

The candidate must have completed a minimum of 6 months of tenure with the organization.
No warning letters in last 6 months of tenure for performance
No more than allowed LWPs(Leave without pay) as per the company norms.
Prior experience or skills in the same sector (department specific)

These criteria are not limited and vary as per the company policy.

Now let's talk about the department in which a candidate can apply for the job as per convenience.

Operations Team (ATL):

Desired Skills: Microsoft Excel

In 80% of the cases, a call center executive wants to apply or to be promoted as an SME/ ATL in the Operations department only. One of the biggest reasons is they have been working in the same culture and leader for months/ years,which creates a good bonding of agent with a Team Leader and or with the colleagues

But to apply for the job post as mentioned above a candidate must have good knowledge of Microsoft Excel which is very imperative to prepare real-time reports and dashboards.

Apart from excel, you must have a leader's approach and vision to executive your job

What is the career path in a Call Center