service à la clientèle

customer service representative

reservation agent

order manager

support specialist

Blue Ocean Contact Centers

I work for blue ocean contact centers for over 5 years. In which i met a lot of fun people. Some people had more than 5 years in the company. I found that we all complained about the same issues. 

Management only looks over their own benefit. If there is going to be a snow storm. They would ask you to go to work 1-2 hours prior to your shift. If your shift is over and there is a snow storm they will ask you to stay and sleep in your chair. 

If you are late 3 minutes (literally) you are late for your shift and they will deduct money from your paycheck. 2;59 min is not a late shift but 3;00 is late. 

But you are expected to stay up to 30-40 min after your shift is over or until they are okay to let you go. Most of the times they will let you go 5-10 min after your shift is over but if you take a bus to go home that means u lose your bus and need to wait 30+ min or 1 hour + if is a weekend. Meaning if your shift is over at 9pm, you end up at home by 10:00 or 10:30pm.

They will always take correction actions in a negative way. Such as notes in your pier, file and after so many they give you a letter saying they will fire you. 

Everyone felt like it was primary school back again. They will have supervisors walking around people and stations making sure you are working and looking at the computer screens. Even though you need to look at the screen for over 7 hours a day. For them every single second of the minute is valuable an you need to take calls, fill reports and help others. If they catch you not looking at the screens working they will file a report and after 3 reports they will give you a letter. After 3 letters you are fired. 

Some of the calls are long and painful. Some callers will make agents cry or feel underpaid.  The information you handle is very sensitive with high cost repercussions. Is way too much and under paid for the amount of responsibilities you have and the information you handle.  

They will take someone new that doesnt really know how things are or work and make him supervisor. That way they take advantage of the "honey moon"stage in people when they fresh start a job. But once the "honey moon" is over is back the same hostile environment.

The only good thing about blue ocean is the floor agents. Hard working people, easy going, friendly and will become your friends for life.  Management, coaches, supervisors are a totally different game. Is like playing dogs and cats or cops and thief's,. 

My advice. Work there only if you need to,, Or if you are a student, new in Halifax and need to make some cash, make friends and get around.

Once you have the chance run away! Find a real job that has future and you can build a career with.

Blue ocean has no future. You are always stuck in the same position. If so they will make you supervisor but supervisors make almost the same money as an agent and have more responsibilities. The main bosses are always the same and had been for years. They keep playing with new coaches or supervisors as if they were cards. 

At the beginning is all pink and blue but with-in 1 month you realize ur stuck at a call center and they want to squeeze every second of your life.......

oh! and dont take to long at the bathroom or they will deduct money from your paycheck even if is a few cents!

Working for Blue Ocean, you should be prepared to be held accountable for call times that you have little control over, and constantly reminded of their unrealistic goals. If you are looking at this position because you enjoy customer service, you will quickly become drained of that enjoyment. Their main goal is to get through calls as quickly as possible, with little regard to if you manage to actually solve the customer's issues in their 3-4 minute wrap time goals. 
If you want a workplace that values their employees, you will want to look elsewhere. You can expect to see a constant stream of new employees coming in due their high turnover (burnout) rate, and be reminded just how replaceable you are. If you accept a work from home position, be prepared to be voluntold to come into the office when it suits them, which can even happen over the holidays when you are trying to visit family. If you do happen to want vacation time, expect to have to apply for it 2-4 months in advance, and only hear back roughly two weeks before the requested time with a notice of rejection.
They do offer internal growth opportunities in the form of multi-stream service care, which means you can be accepting phone calls, digital chat, and emails. Don't expect any extra compensation for the added responsibilities though. In addition, once you have accepted the multi-stream role, you may be told to take calls, answer chats, and do emails at the same time, so I hope you have at least 3 monitors to use because you will need them.
Coworkers are usually quite nice, as are some supervisors, however the majority of management/supervisors are just there to make sure you are keeping to your call times.
If you have the misfortune of being hired as part-time, you can expect to be scheduled full time hours, with your schedule changing on a weekly basis, including weekends. This equates to you rarely having two days off in a row, and it will never happen on a weekend. In fact, you are lucky to get a weekend day off more than once every 2-3 weeks. Good luck with any sort of work/life balance.
If you do manage to leave here with your sanity intact, don't expect any sort of reference when applying to future jobs due to references being against company policy.

In short, screaming into the void will give you equal fulfilment in your life than your role here, but at least the void doesn't force you to make customers' days worse.

A typical day at BOCC would be finding a seat. Most departments do not have assigned seating and several of the employees that come do not clean the desk. Some of the desks I have had to sit at had a thick layer of dusk, smoking ashes practically glued to the keyboard, several people had been coughing and hacking all over the stations. They do provide cleaning rags but they never get the job done well enough. The air temperature is set at 17C year round which leaves most people cold and more apt to get ill. They use an air exchange instead of allowing for fresh air and therefore the air becomes very stale and dry and a prefect breeding ground for virus' to float around. There are always virus' going around and there were a few days that I went to work with at least 30 other employees suffering from Strep Throat and spreading the virus around. For sanitary reasons I would say this is a terrible place to work. Otherwise they are very friendly and great employers.

The company is great. You are always treated with professionalism, the staff is friendly, and they try to be as nice as possible. They try to compensate for the nature of the job with prizes, and benefits. However, the job and the activities you perform are far from enjoyable. You have to deal with all kinds of people, and you often receive insults, Karens yelling, and ridiculous calls from people trying to reach out to the president, or a directive of the company. Unfortunately, you cannot answer back or hung up on those calls. Additionally, when you receive a bad review from these kinds of clowns, it does not matter if you are right or wrong, or if you did your best, the supervisors will make you crawl and apologize to them for their own incompetence. For these reasons, I believe I am very underpaid. If you are an extrovert and enjoy relating to people, you might make it, if not, you will have a bad time. 

A typical day show up early get what I needed for my station, listen to the briefing, grab what i needed at my desk. Get to work and call people and see if they would like to participate in a survey. I learned that calling people all hours of the day sucks for them, but that we had deadlines/quotas to meet. The management team was great they helped with any issues I had and tried to give you as much help as possible. Co workers were amazing too they were great to get along with and to talk with. I am still friends with a lot of them to date. Hardest part was to get yelled at by random people. Most enjoyable part was to have everyone work as a family. Have everyone work together and help each other.

A typical day at work is fast paced, large call volume, irate customers. Lots of problem solving and documenting all customer concerns. At Blue Ocean I learned to be a proficient multitasker. Listening to the customer while also fixing the problem at hand.

We had a wonderful support team of managers that helped us through when calls got tough.

Workplace culture was very bad for gossip. Agents always talking and seeking drama within the call centre,

Hardest part of the job was dealing with call volume when agents called in sick.

Most enjoyable part of working for Blue Ocean was the management team and how much they cared for our health, happiness and overall well-being.

I have worked for only two call centres and this one is definitely the worst. The atmosphere is grim and grave with low morale. The coaches are educated with very little management experience and are overworked. They do not have experience working with people. The management and management style is old. They have not adjusted their sales styles and strategies to meet this economy. The pay is below standard and they have cut back on benefit packages. Only managers get family benefits. It is a stat based pay scale for which no one can get the maximum pay raise which is 20%. $20 per cent of $11 is how much per year?

Overall friendly environment, clean, polite, very Canadian business casual culture
Not really opportunity to grow
Inconsistent Project Management, sometimes poor. Overall they treat employees very well with the exception of some empowered head supervisors and project manager
flexible hours, time off booking, accommodating
Old recruiting rep was amazing, when he moved to a different project within the company, the people who stayed really did an awful job not following up, etc

I worked here at their “best project” they had a general interview. Screened grammar and then it was good I was in. I was valued and moved off phones about 3 months in, what they love to call “unilateral” moves these which equate to “specialization” without a raise or title. More work without any benefit. Truth is there is such a high amount of culpability with no addition to the pay. I worked a year and made a whole 30c more than when I began and it wasn’t gonna go up even though new hires were and are paid more than the day to day employees  gross awful mean girl high school mentality too it’s not a fun or safe space to work in.

Being on the phone can be miserable, but once you get an off phone position it gets easier. I got lucky to have a good trainer and a good manager. The overall work culture is supportive and positive, if you need help and ask for it, they will try to help you. They also have summer and holiday treats as a way to connect with their employee(its not much but better than nothing). Their pay is terrible, definitely lower than industry rate and for the quality they ask from you, it's totally underpay. Work life balance is good, they have great incentives too but depends on which program you are in.

Top Job Titles	Average salary
Service à la clientèle 8 salaries reported	$18.19 per hour
Customer service representative 9 salaries reported	$16.89 per hour
Reservation agent 1 salary reported	$17.00 per hour
Order manager 14 salaries reported	$17.39 per hour
Support specialist 1 salary reported	$19.00 per hour

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