Devoted to the call center industry, the agents on the phones, and their managers

Flexibility was a value I appreciated in  my first now-defunct call center. It gave us a different, even a refreshing, perspective.

Commitment: We could decide if a battle was worth fighting for the company's sake, not for the sake of a rule. That is, if we were spending more money denying a credit on a bill than we would spend issuing the credit, we could issue the credit instead of standing on principle. Many reps stood on principle anyway, but they liked to argue.

Of course, we perked up and our hearts beat a little faster when we pulled up the account and saw they were spending thousands of dollars a month with us. We could decide to give them some extra time and attention. But we weren't encouraged to decide that one of our customers wasn't worth enough time and attention to get their problems solved. No one in management ever told me to spend less time on a customer because they didn't spend much money with us.

Maybe that didn't fit another company's call center training curriculum or their best practices, but as Tom Vander Well points out, who were we trying to please?