Calltech

Calltech is an outsourcing company in Columbus, Ohio that takes projects from other companies and pays people much less than they should for skilled phone work. Their main project is for Bellsouth.Net, a large, southern internet provider. Other projects, include Prodigy, Compuserve, Priceline.Com and many other, smaller projects. Calltech is notorius for it's bad turn over rate and horrible policies, as they pay less than the average fast food place to come and do semi-skilled work.

CallTech: see The Root of All Evil

CallTech is now actually a chain of call centers. They are based out of Columbus, Ohio and have centers in Albany, Georgia, Brownsville, Pennsylvania, and Fort Myers, Flordia. Basically how it works is this: You run some kind of company that needs to be able to have customers call in for some reason. Could be they need to place orders from a catalog, could be that they need technical support, whatever. But the deal is it takes a lot of money to set up your own callcenter. You've got to buy all kinds of phone equipment, computer, train personnel, etc. Basically a gigantic pain in the ass. So what CallTech and other places like Client Logic do is take this job off the customer's hands. You pay CallTech some ungodly huge fee, and they'll handle all of your shits for you.

CallTech is known far and wide as the bottom of the callcenter industry. The employees of CallTech are known to be the dregs of society, but that can be good because there's always someone around who is crazier than you.

Back in the good old days CallTech was known for it's drug scene. In fact people who didn't even work there would drive in to the parking lot for the sole purpose of scoring some dope.

Calltech, however, has provided one of those oddly universal social structures wherein you discover people have all worked there at some point or another. You might be working another faceless, nameless office job at some customer service call center, like Verizon Wireless or OSU and its technical support department, and discover idly in conversation that more than half the people around you have worked there at some point, and then you subsequently trade stories of what a jerk some-guy-or-other was.

Security and management have never been at their best at Calltech. In the early days when they serviced CompuServe customers from a small rented office space on Marconi Blvd. in Columbus, Ohio, they had a 'hot seat' method of desk assignment akin to the shortage of beds on a Naval submarine. What this meant was that they didn't have sufficient desk cubicles to allow people coming on the night shift to take a seat while the day shift was still finishing out their time; you had to basically wait and play 'Musical Chairs' until someone freed up sufficient seats for everyone on the next shift to get one.

Like most call centers, Calltech is notoriously ridiculous about keeping call time averages low but service response high, something which anyone with common sense should know are almost entirely mutually-exclusive ideas. You can't service a customer sufficiently if you're racing to get them off the phone in less than a minute-and-a-half average time. CallTech also lacked some basic administrative capabilities; on occasion employees could be fired or disciplined because of what some other employee had done on their computers (the systems sometimes inconveniently would let you log in under someone else's retained password and login name, causing anything done to be done under the wrong identity, even if it was shown later that the person who was being blamed wasn't even in the building at that time, or scheduled to work that day).

It's not exactly a model of modern outsourcing genius. CallTech has at times even turned down contracts, most notably from WinStar Telecom, just before that illustrious organization went out of business for stock trading fraud. So they DO in fact have standards...just incredibly low ons.