Title: Are your agents getting ill?
Source : Programa Fantástico
Date : 07/10/05
When conversations are by phone, a lot of formalities are on. It’s mister here miss there. That’s what irritates the costumer, but telemarketing agent can’t act another way.
The 600 telemarketing agent are trained to act according to a script written on PC monitor. “There’s nothing more than just a call production line” explains Adrien Cunha, marketing director .
The agents don’t raise their voice, but are getting sick. This is the Leonide Galasso conclusion, of public healthy college from Universidade de São Paulo. For eight months she followed the work of 500 agents. Check the numbers: 77% complain of muscles pains, 76% suffer from anxiety, 66% from irritability. All of these factors indicate stress.” You have to be fast, correct, necessary, gracious, you might not wake up at anytime you wish”, explains the sociologist.
“The way of pressuring might be wrong. You have to motivate the human being for the personal development side” says Marcelo Risato, from Associação Brasileira de Telemarketing, (Brazilian Telemarketing Association).
The student… works for 2 months as a telemarketing agent, but didn’t handle the pressure. Nowadays she makes treatment with a neurologist and a psychiatrist.” Now I don’t cry that much, neither have trembles in the body. The doctor said it’s nervousism, and I freak out when I don’t reach my goal”, says her.
Other than pressure, control and the few rests, the agents complain about autonomy lackness and always repeat the same phrases. “It’s necessary to have this formality because we don’t know who’s in the other side, says Solange Shehtman, telemarketing teacher.
This formality makes part of the training; it was copied from United States , where telemarketing was born. “In a service in USA the client himself want it to be quick and the agent doesn’t like to talk much, it’s different from our culture, that the client and the agent wants to talk”, explains Marcos Emilio, of Telemarketing Workers Trade Union-SP.
