Pros
I made good friends and enjoyed working as part of a large team. My team manager was the only decent one there.
Cons
Staff are treated appallingly. You are given very little training and then thrown in the deep end. There were only training systems for the simplest procedures - the more complicated and difficult ones you had to learn for the first time with a customer on the other line. Senior management had a very clear "three strikes and you're out" policy - three "breaches" (for example, not reading a script) and you were sacked, regardless of how long you had been working for the company. One guy was sacked for this after working there for 6 years. Everyone lived in constant fear of getting a breach and being sacked. How long you took for your break and lunch was also closely monitored - if you took 11 minutes rather than 10 they wanted to know why. You also had to deal with appalling systems that had been in place since the 1960s (that is not an exaggeration) which came up with error messages constantly, which meant you would have to explain to a customer that you couldn't insure their car that day and would have to ring them back when the system was working. The hours were also terrible - an 8 or 9 hour shift and at one point we were walking an eight day week every fortnight.
