Food For Thought:
In an inbound call centre you're forced to deal with a huge amount of information all at one time. Days, times, names and numbers are thrust at you from all angles and you're forced to make sense of it, all while speaking with a customer and trying to solve their problem.
Anyway, what I'm getting at is that we (in a collective call centre employee sense) deal with a very large volume of information all the time, and not all this information is something Mr. Joe Blow would really want any one stranger to know. When was the last time you had someone randomly walk up to you and say, "Hi random person on the street! My name is Joe Blow, my phone number is 416 555 5555, and my Social Insurance Number is..." What? Never? Really... well then why don't people have a problem with dialing a 1-800 number and spilling their guts over the phone?
Alright, now since I'm the one writing this, I'll look at it from my point fo view. In the run of a day I can deal with very sensitive information about over 80 people, sometimes more. After not even 10 seconds into the call I have the caller's name, address, home phone number, and probably a business number or cell. Now all of this information alone is pretty potent, but wait, 5 more seconds and a couple clicks later.. payment history, credit issues, billing history, and tons of other stuff I don't even know about yet (i'm still exploring our billing system)!
In other parts of this call centre, credit card numbers (along with all other important info) is read aloud, and if I were the type of person with a malicious nature, i might go around writing that information down, and keeping it for personal use. But I don't, nor would I ever.
With all of this information at your fingertips, you could seriously wreak some havoc on any one person.. or as is ever popular these days, steal their identity.
But nothing much ever happens to those customer we deal with on a daily basis. Why? I don't think most call centre employees really understand with what kind of information they're dealing with.. nor do the customers really realize what infomation they're willingly giving out to some stranger over the phone.
Anyway, I feel the need to say I do the job to the best of my ability and always try to help everyone, even the jackasses (thought there are times I really don't want to).. I'm just mentioning how free we are with our information these days. Keep that in mind.
Another interesting (perhaps scary) thing about call centres:
Much like when you're at
McDonalds, you know that you should never piss off the 15-year-old making your burger or you might find yourself bighting into a little something you weren't expecting, never piss off or annoy a call centre employee. We don't have managers hovering over us watching that we don't spit in your burger, and we know how to bend the rules and procedures just right so that you might not get the best result...
not that I ever do this :)