Good benefits but very mentally draining. Avoid - Customer Care Agent Barclays Employee Review

Very long review but I want to make it clear to people who are about the make the same mistake as I did. As somebody who has never worked in a call centre before, this job was the most mentally draining position I have ever faced. You are sat at a computer for 6 hours a day with a headset on taking calls, and you are tracked from the minute your shift starts until the minute it ends. They want you taking calls constantly. Your after call work is monitored and you are expected to be in it for around 20 seconds, so tough luck if you didn’t get all your notes completed on the call or if you need to raise something for a customer once the call has finished. If you are in it after call work for any longer, your team leader will physically change your status back to ready. Your average call handling time is monitored and you will be nagged for it, despite management knowing every call is different. Even checking your own stats is monitored. The customers are what really ruin this job. You will speak to some really nasty people every single day. Demanding things that cannot be done, arguing with you, guilt tripping you, trying to make you feel bad for them, and speaking to you however they want. You just have to sit there and take it. You cannot end the call either, you have to wait for them to end it. So a lot of the time you will be stuck on calls for 20+ minutes repeating the same information until they finally decide to give up. The bank doesn’t help as they have a lot of silly processes and some of the decisions they make make the job so much harder, and these decisions are made by people who have most likely never worked on the phones in their life and will never have to face any customers their decisions affect. The biggest example of this is how they close all the branches, which makes it very difficult when dealing with elderly or vulnerable customers. Sometimes the only way an issue can be resolved is by the customer needing to visit a branch, but when they can’t and there is no other option, you are STILL expected to ask them what other support they need to help with their banking, when they are already complaining the support they receive is not good enough from us. You have to force yourself through the conversation and it’s honestly embarrassing, but if you don’t discuss it, QA will fail your call and you will be in the wrong for “not providing the customer a good experience,” without any understanding of how hard the situation actually is. If you need support from a manager, it can take 15–20 minutes to get a response. By that time your customer is frustrated, your call time has gone up, and then later management are questioning your stats. It’s so frustrating. Every call is different and the stats system is ridiculous. When calls are back to back every day, you are not even allowed a couple of minutes to yourself. It is such a mentally demanding place to work and I would never recommend it to anyone unless you have worked in these environments before, know exactly what you are getting yourself into, and can actually handle it. You are given shifts months in advance, which they brag about in recruitment, but it means nothing because they constantly change them. You still can’t plan your time around them. They will add weekends to your rota just because they can, and because it’s stated in your contract they can change shifts whenever they want. When you apply you start on everyday banking phone lines and are told you will stay in that department, where shifts are mainly Monday to Friday with maybe 1 or 2 weekends a month. You WILL eventually be moved to the Premier phone lines. Management makes it out like this is a promotion, but it isn’t. You do more work for no extra pay, weekends change to a 1 on 1 off basis, and shifts can run as late as 9pm–11pm. There is a big increase in rotation and it basically becomes shift work. They do not tell you this in the interview and wait until your training is finished, when it’s too late to quit without something else lined up. If you want to book holidays, Good luck! Busy periods such as Christmas, half term, Fridays, Mondays etc get booked up straight away. If you want a bank holiday off you have to book it months in advance otherwise they’re won’t be enough space for you to do it. Holiday availability goes off of everybody that works in the same department as you and not just in your team. If you want a full week off maybe for a holiday, if one of the days in the week is fully booked, you won’t be able to have the full week off. At one point there was no availability for a Friday, Saturday or Monday off for at least 6 weeks in advance. If you have any important holidays or know you want to take time off in December and January over Christmas or new years, make sure you put the dates down as pre existing holidays (even if they aren’t and you have nothing planned) on your first day otherwise they will never be approved and you will be made to work Christmas Eve, Boxing Day, New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. The only good thing I can say about this job is the benefits. If you get a good team leader who understands how mind numbing it is being on the phones, they will try to schedule you time off them for an hour just so you can decompress, but most of the time this gets declined by their management. The pension scheme is one of the best, 12% contribution with no requirement from you. Private healthcare, sick pay as well as SSP, and good discounts outside of work. These are some of the best benefits I’ve ever had, but honestly it feels like they have to offer these to make up for how draining the job actually is. Once you start seeing what really goes on, you realise none of it is worth it