Every call is recorded in two channels, the agent and the customer, so quality can listen to either. On extension 2020 the agent channel has two voices. The agent's, and under it, very low, a second one, a woman's, saying the sentence a second before the agent says it. The agent does not hear it. The agent has the best scores on the floor. The agent has been at that extension for six months, and the six before her had the same scores, and the same voice.
I am a quality analyst at a call centre and I listen to calls for a living, and extension 2020 is the one I listen to with the headphones pressed hard.
The recordings.
Two channels. The customer on one, the agent on the other, so we can turn either up. The agent channel picks up the headset microphone, which is an inch from the mouth, and it does not pick up the floor, because the floor is loud and the microphone is built not to.
On 2020, under the agent, there is a second voice.
The voice.
A woman. Low. Not a whisper, a normal voice, quietly, pitched for somebody at the next desk. She says a sentence. A second later, the agent says the sentence. The same one. Not similar. The same words, in the same order, and the agent says it well, because it is a good sentence, and the customer is helped.
All call. Every call. The voice says the next thing, and the agent says it.
The agent does not hear it. I have asked. She looked at me as if I were mad. She says she just knows what to say, that it comes to her, and it does, a second after the voice says it.
What has been checked.
The headset, replaced. The extension, moved to a different desk. The voice is on the recordings from the new desk.
The agents. Six months each, about, on 2020, over the years, because 2020 is a seat that gets the top scores and top scorers get promoted. Every one of them has the voice under them. I have gone back through the archive, which keeps calls for seven years, and it is there for seven years, under six agents, saying the sentence a second before.
The sentence. I have written down a hundred of them. They are not the script. They are better than the script. They are what a person who had done this job for a very long time and cared about it would say, and they have things in them that we do not train, and that the agents on 2020 all say, and that the agents on 2020 are all promoted for.
Who.
I asked the floor manager who had 2020 before the archive started. She said, before the archive, 2020 was a trainer's desk. A woman who had been the floor's trainer for years, who sat beside new agents on their first calls and, with her headset split into theirs, told them what to say. Quietly. A second ahead. Until they could do it themselves, and then she moved on to the next one.
She had died, the floor manager said, on the floor, in that seat, in the middle of a call she was sitting in on, and the agent she was training had finished the call, well, because the last thing she had said was the right thing to say, and it had been a good call.
She is still training. Every call. Every agent on 2020, for seven years, has been her trainee, and every one has been the best on the floor, and none of them knew.
What is done about it.
The second voice is on the recordings and the recordings are the legal record and I have flagged it and quality has listened and heard it and has decided, in a meeting, that it is crosstalk, and has written that down, and it is not crosstalk, and everybody in the meeting knew.
What I do.
I listen.
The agents on 2020 get promoted and go, and the next one sits down, and she trains them. That is the system, and it works, and I have not touched it, except for one thing.
There is a form we fill in when an agent has been trained, a sign off, with the trainer's name on it. Nobody has signed the trainer's line for anybody who came off 2020 in seven years, because the trainer's line is for a person, and I have started signing it. Her name. I got it from the floor manager. Every agent who comes off 2020 now has a training record with her name on it as the trainer, and the date, and my initials as witness, because I have witnessed it, on a hundred calls, and it is true.
The voice on the recordings has changed, a little, since I started signing. At the end of each call, after the agent's last line, after the customer has gone, there is a sentence that the agent does not repeat, because there is nobody to say it to, and it is, every time, well done, love, that was a good one, and the agent, on the channel, breathes out, and does not know why.