Working at a call centre can be a tedious job if you are not planning on making a career out of the business. Contact centres do offer their employees the chance to talk to a variety of people all day long – every day, but the repetition of the service being offered is what can make a day long for some agents. Therefore, it is not surprising that most agents who work in a virtual office will have often funny tales to tell of misunderstandings and other comical interactions with the people on the other end of the line. Contact centres serve a vital purpose in our modern business landscape and with greater numbers of people working full time in such environments a little levity is necessary to keep morale up.

Some of the more amusing anecdotes overheard in a call centre involved those in the booking office for a major airline. One day an agent was heard telling her client on the other end of the phone line, "No ma’am, we cannot give you a window seat that opens. The windows on the plane don’t open – you would be sucked out of the plane if they did." Another agent made the necessary arrangements for a passenger’s pet as the passenger was flying back home from a maritime destination. All was booked and ready until the passenger mentioned that his pet was actually a lobster. Yet another misunderstanding in this same virtual office involved one of the agents insisting to a passenger that there was no airport in the city that the passenger wanted to leave from – because the agent grew up there and knew that there was no airport. The passenger kept insisting that there was an airport and finally a supervisor had to step in and clarify that there was an airport in the city the passenger was talking about – a city with the same name as the agent’s hometown but in a totally different area of the country.

Contact centres are a growing business. Greater numbers of people count on a call centre for their livelihood and they must find ways of combating, what can be, a monotonous situation. However, most call centre employers are conscious of this fact and work hard towards creating a fun and motivational atmosphere for their call centre agents. In fact, every virtual office that actively encouraged employees to take breaks together, form friendships and to participate in group activities found that their productivity levels increased. Those contact centres that discouraged people from taking breaks with their friends and discouraged interactions found their productivity levels decreased. Although unscientific in its scope, this unofficial survey of what motivates people to perform at their peak in a call centre did prove that people who enjoyed going to work would perform better, regardless of whether they liked their actual job or not.

There are bound to be plenty of amusing anecdotes from virtual offices from around the world. As long as every call centre agent finds a way to keep busy, keep motivated and keep happy, the engines that run the contact centres will continue to perform at their peak.