Customer Service Job Roles Hit Badly by 'Credit Crunch'

I’ve got a number of Google alerts set up so that I can easily track what’s going on in our sector. If you’ve never used Google alerts before (www.google.com/alerts), then I highly recommend it. Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results all thrown together i.e. web, news, blogs, etc based on your choice of query or keyword topic.

Two of my alerts are for the key phrases “customer service jobs” and “call centre jobs” and these help me to monitor a developing news story. I go through my alerts weekly and I must admit that over the last few months most of the alerts I have received have been about various call centres making redundancies and customer service teams shrinking.

At present the unemployment figure lies at just over 2.3 million people and some analysts are forecasting this figure to rise to 3.2 million.

Not only is unemployment rising but government stats also show that the number of jobs available has also fallen (we’ve certainly felt that over here on Jobs in Customer Service). Across the whole of the UK, the number of vacancies dropped to a record low of 429,000 in the three months to June, down by 35,000 from the previous quarter.

The number of unemployed men increased by almost 200,000 to 1.46 million, and 84,000 more women were out of work, putting female unemployment at 923,000.

So, as an employer of customer service and call centre professionals what can you do to help ease the pain for those individuals facing unemployment? Here are few suggestions:

1 - Why not prepare a ‘leavers pack’ with information on the various customer service jobs boards and recruitment agencies that might help them to find work, along with web links to useful advice sites such as www.armchairadvice.co.uk and http://careersadvice.direct.gov.uk

2 - Prepare a written reference for the unfortunate individual so they can use it as part their next job application

3 - Partner with an outplacement specialist to clearly demonstrate that you are a principled and concerned employer. Additionally, this will help to minimise the adverse impact of employees leaving with negative feelings toward the organization and thus helps to maintain a positive brand image.

Facing unemployment is stressful at the best of times but in a deep recession it’s even more worrying for the individual as new employment opportunities are few and far between.  There’s no doubt that the our sector has been hit hard, with many of the biggest recruiters of call centre and customer service staff (i.e. banks, financial services & retail) feeling the full force of the ‘credit crunch’ but many analysts think we’re through the worst of it and we should see things pick up in early 2010.