Customer Service Members Take on Industry Challenges

CWA customer service professionals met this week in New Orleans to discuss the successes and challenges for customer service workers across CWA sectors.

About 250 participants from across CWA participated: operators, retail store employees, media advertising sales and yellow pages employees, and FiOS, U-Verse and customer call center employees. At least half were new participants to the conference.

Executive Vice President Annie Hill led the discussions as participants talked about the union approach to critical issues like monitoring, scripting and performances objectives. Hill also announced the creation of a CWA standing committee to deal with customer service issues on an ongoing basis.

CWA President Larry Cohen talked about CWA's vision of the "high road" for customer service work, where customer service professionals can solve problems and meet customers' needs, as opposed to a management short-sighted focus on sales alone.

Rose Batt, a Cornell Unversity professor, talked about the customer service industry from a global perspective. Her recent research found offshoring in customer service "to be less than many people think," with 75 percent of U.S. generated call center work now being done in the United States.

She pointed to growth in telecom customer service work in wireless, video and broadband as those technologies expand. She said about 10 percent of the 4 million customer service workers in the United States are union-represented, and that CWA is by far the nation's largest customer service union.

Workshops were held on monitoring, sales commissions and incentives, how to mobilize in the call center environment and family and medical leave. Participants also heard bargaining reports from several CWA sectors. 

CWA Representative Mike Farenholt gave participants a look at what has happened in New Orleans in the three and a half years after Hurricane Katrina.  No customer service operations remain in the city; all were moved out, he said. "Some neighborhoods are coming back and some are really struggling," he said.