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If you grow frustrated with your complaints bouncing across the globe, you might ask to be transferred to your local office. That sounds reasonable, right? Too bad it's impossible.

"We can't transfer customers to their local office. There simply is no way. If we try to transfer them, they will enter the call center roulette again, and there is no way to know which call center they will get," Linda says. "It can be in Argentina, Mexico, the Philippines, India, or one in the USA. We have no control over that."

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Some of them never pick up the phone, no matter how much it rings.

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Also keep in mind that retention in call centers is abysmal. "Each generation of employees were numbered," Linda says, "and my generation's number was in the thousands. Every two months, there is at least one new training class, with 20 to 25 people. Those are the ones who make the cut, and when they finish their training, they hit the floor. In total, there could be between 70 and 100 CAEs (representatives) on the floor taking calls." Meaning that at any given time, 1 in 4 reps are in their first couple months on the job. Hey, remember all those errors that new employees make due to poor training, and the live accounts they make them on due to ... spite, we guess?