Disclamer: This post is inspired by a comment that Rico left me in one of my blog entries and Gary’s post about call center martyrdom.

Being a team lead, I’ve had agents with several payroll disputes over time. Funny though, I had never reacted as violently as some people who complain about discrepancies in their payroll. Watching them open up their payslips and browse through the computation of their pay can be compared to watching dynamite go… BOOM! You hand them their payslips, they tear of the sides to see the contents of it, you their eyes go from side to side and stop at the bottom right corner of the payslip and then…

“BOOOOOOOOSSSSS!!!”

God help us all.

I understand that its about principle, but I guess I’m like this because of my family. Having discussions everyday about money with my C.P.A. dad and former Executive Secretary slash Accountant mom made be allergic to talking about money. So you can picture my reaction when I learned that I’ll be handling a Collections team. I digress.

I’m sure that day job companies also have payroll issues. But I’m almost 100% sure that call center payroll issues are beyond comparison. Why do I think so? Well, its pretty simple. Compared to the usual day job, call centers’ compensation can be is rather very complicated. You get a lot of different things added such as Night Differential, Hazard Pay, Allowances, Special and Legal Holiday pay, Commission, etc.

So imagine Mr. Juan Dela Cruz coming to work on Christmas from the hours of 1AM to 10PM. For this day alone, Mr. Dela Cruz should be entitled to:

• Night Differential from the hours of 1AM to 6AM.
• Hazard Pay since he came to work between the hours of 1AM-3AM.
• Regular Holiday pay.
• Other compensation benefits given by the company.

Not to mention that during this payroll period, he would have had work on December 30 which is again another Regular Holiday (Rizal Day), wherein his work schedule may again start in between 1AM to 3AM… well, you get the gist right?

Now imagine poor Juan, who just sacrificed not spending Noche Buena with his family because he was scheduled to go to work and was not approved a leave, opening his payslip and screams “@&%$#@*!!!” because he didn’t get the pay he deserved. *Sigh*… sad, but very likely to happen.

An irate customer over the phone is already a handful, irate internal customers (the employees) who come to you face to face complaining about money issues is not something anyone would look forward to. Nowadays, call centers rely on specially designed software to deal with this problem. But of course, there will still be discrepancies in some cases wherein the team leaders would manually enter the time the agent got at work. I’m not sure if all call centers have this already. But based on experience (and this is purely my opinion) the most accurate payroll computation I’ve had was when the company had a third party managing the books.

So for all those aspiring call center people, he’s another thing to add to your pros and cons list.