What it’s like to be an Access Canberra worker

In her career working at the Access Canberra Contact Centre, there have been multiple times Paige has had to terminate a call.

And while she says it’s not something she’s experienced every day, having the support from Access Canberra to end a confronting, upsetting or downright rude conversation with a customer is something that empowers her to keep working—and moving upwards—in a job she loves.

Originally joining the Access Canberra team six years ago as a contractor on the Contact Centre phone lines, Paige is now the Operational Support Officer—a role that allows her to help the staff who are the first point of contact for many locals trying to access government services.

“On the phones, I used to love being able to assist the community, being able to speak with people and have the conversations where you can tell they need that friendly voice over the phone,” she says. “It was really rewarding knowing that with each phone call, you were able to assist with fixing a problem.”

“In my new role as Operational Support Officer, I like being able to support the staff who are taking these phone calls or being able to ensure all the admin is squared away, that their rosters are looking good, that they’re getting the best out of any training they want to do and just making sure that they don’t have any problems to worry about.”

“We’re not here to be yelled at and abused.”

Access Canberra has recently brought in an ‘Occupational Violence Break’ for contact centre staff to use when they need to step away from the desk after a hard or upsetting call. It’s just one of the recent changes that Paige says has been ‘amazing’ in helping to support the teams, as are internal workshops that focus on the processes in place for dealing with aggressive customers.

“”For every bad call, I’d get 10 good calls and at the end of the day, I knew that once the phone call is over, it was over. I didn’t have to answer that phone call again. We’re not here to be yelled at or abused and we know that we are supported by our management team to end those calls,” Paige says.

Understanding that everyone has bad days and sometimes they don’t have anyone else to take it out on, for Paige and her team at Access Canberra having this boundary in place helps them to remind callers that they’re only human too.

“I find that customers will call Access Canberra and they speak to us on the phone as the first point of contact and they expect us to be able to fix all of their problems…we are human and we can’t be specialists in everything,” she says.

“We’re just the first point of contact and we’re here to help as much as we can but there is going to be a limit to what we can assist with.”

The OV break initiative is just one of the ways Access Canberra is working to support its staff, with a comprehensive OV Management Framework in place to support staff safety.  Key to the framework is empowering staff that ‘OV is not part of the job’ as well as to hold members of the community who may behave unacceptably towards staff to account.

Back to Paige and from helping the vulnerable, hanging up the phone, and what she wishes customers would understand (plus all the other thoughts running around in her head), what stands out when Paige thinks about her role at the Contact Centre?

“My favourite phone calls will always be with elderly customers who aren’t good with computers or don’t really understand the new technology side of the way things are done. Being able to find ways to assist them and deliver the service is always really rewarding,” says Paige.