Raise your hand if you’ve ever ended a call center conversation with a mix of despair, frustration, and helplessness. I’ve been on my own journey with Rogers’ customer service these past two months, and with every call, the issues on my bill just seem to get worse.

This is no accident. This is by design. I know, because I worked for months as a call center agent for a big telecom years ago, and I can tell you — helping the customer is the last priority. I was literally told that by my supervisor.

Here’s how it works: Before you start taking any calls, there’s some intense training. You show up for your shift, and all you do is attend classes for at least two months. You have classmates, a teacher, and you’re supposed to graduate at the end of the testing period. But there’s a caveat — you need to reach three goals in order to graduate, one of which is to keep your average call time under 12 minutes.

I’m not going to touch on all the yelling, blaming, and xenophobia on the part of the customers — that would warrant a whole other article. Let’s focus on what the job was about.

To me, it was hard not to empathize with the caller (even the shouting ones). I soon realized that many of them were calling for the second, third, or fifth time trying to solve something that looked perfectly straightforward. The thing is, a lot of these issues required time and investigation — digging into different systems and previous notes to get to the bottom of the problem and find a real solution.

Being a lover of a good mystery as I am, I would dive in.

With time, I learned that quick fixes would often result in repeated calls. One example was when the user had an incorrect email address on their account. If you tried to change it on the customer’s main page, you could even save it, but that didn’t actually solve the issue. You had to make the change in three other places as well. I discovered that during a 50-minute call with a guy who was (rightfully so) pulling his hair out because it was the fourth time he had called to fix this, and he’d missed several payments as a result. I saved and tested, saved and tested, until I finally found the right fields to change.

A lot of my calls were like that — trying to get real resolutions while people waited on the phone. One time I was on a 1h30m call with a woman, working on her file while she read a book. I got the job done. My ratings were off the charts. Customers were happy.

But here’s the thing — remember that graduation goal? Agents had to keep calls under 12 minutes if they wanted to actually get the job. That goal exists to increase the number of calls the center is able to take, and to push agents toward faster resolutions. But there’s also a monetary reason: the telecom would only pay the center for the first 12 minutes of each call. After that, the agents were basically working for free. That put enormous pressure on supervisors.

As you can expect, my average call time was well over that — it was actually close to 45 minutes. So one day my supervisor pulled me aside and said that if I wanted to graduate, I needed to focus on reducing that number. “Forget about the customer and focus on the clock,” were his words.

So I tried to do that, in my own way. I learned the best hacks to solve problems faster so I could get the easy calls out of the way. One time I literally updated a guy’s address in less than 90 seconds. He was aghast — “Is it really done? That was so fast!” — “That’s how it should be,” I said. And I meant it.

I could still handle medium-complexity cases, but the really complicated ones? I just couldn’t afford the time anymore. So I started doing what all my colleagues were doing: directing the caller to other departments, even though I knew they wouldn’t solve the problem.

This dynamic is the same in every big call center. All over the country (and abroad), agents are pressured to reduce time on calls instead of actually helping customers. As a result, customers with unresolved issues keep calling back, flooding the lines, and creating even more pressure to go faster. The cycle continues ad infinitum.

Add to that the burnout and lack of career progression, and you get a volatile industry — more than 80% of telecom agents quit within their first six months. That means it’s more likely than not that you’ll get an inexperienced agent when you call — and certain issues can only be solved by someone who’s been around long enough to know where to look.

So if you’ve ever felt like you weren’t being helped, you probably weren’t. And while many agents do deserve blame, we also need to look at the system that makes them work that way.