The first thing that you must know when working in a call center is what your responsibilities are because every center asks its employees to handle different things. In some cases, you might even be responsible for answering emails, so make sure that you have the ability to do so if need be. Things will always pop up with these jobs that were not expected, so make sure that you are prepared for absolutely anything that could go wrong. Whenever a new issue arises, you must be on top of it because the company is paying you to prevent any customer problems from escalating.
There will probably be a great deal of documentation for you to look over, so you will have to take the extra time to read over this. It might also be a good idea to keep a list close to your phone, so that you can refer to these documents if you run into any serious problems when dealing with a customer. It might also come in handy to re-write these documents into a format that you can easily access, as call center jobs do not give you much time to search through these documents in order to get things done the right way.
Keep in mind that a call center will force you to deal with people from all walks of life, so you must be prepared to stay in an upbeat mood no matter what. You could go from speaking to a nice, old lady one minute to an angry young man the next minute, so you must learn to take the good with the bad and do not get too down on yourself. Nothing that happens on the phone is your fault, but you are merely a scapegoat as an employee of the company. Also, you must make sure that you do not take out a bad day on a customer, as it is not their fault that someone else has treated you poorly.
Communicating efficiently will make sure that your call center jobs run smoothly, as a lack of communication is the most common reason why people do not last. As time as you are able to calmly speak with every customer and help him or her with his or her problems, you will definitely be looked at as a success. This type of job is not for everyone, but they are plentiful because many companies are starting to move their centers back to the United States because of complaints they had received in the past, making now the perfect time to apply.