On Monday February 18 I started my first full-time job at Free and Clear as a tobacco-cessation counselor. Their business is to make and take phone calls for people who contacted us about stopping smoking. They have an awesome business model because they do not have to advertise to the public, only to the government and to companies, and they do not even have to make hard sales pitches.
It works like this: if someone smokes then they destroy their health. If they are poor then they are on state welfare, so the state has to pay for their medical problems. If they have money then they probably have health insurance, and the insurance company pays for their health problems. Neither the state nor the insurance companies want to pay for smokers’ problems. Therefore, the government and insurance companies hire Free and Clear to help people to quit smoking.
Free and Clear does everything over the phone. Through state advertising (tobacco quit lines) or through in-company advertising funded by insurance companies people call Free and Clear looking for help to stop smoking. The counselors are supposed to talk to them for fifteen minutes maximum on the phone, send them some pamphlets, and depending on the state government or insurance company’s wishes, send them nicotine replacement like gum or patches or make a referral for prescription drugs. The average person gets five of those calls over about four months and has stopped smoking by the third call. Almost all of the people who contact the company want to stop smoking anyway, so Free and Clear has a good success rate due to the client’s own initiative.
I do not know exactly what they charge to do these five calls, but it must be in the neighborhood of $30-50 a call so $150-250 per person. They are struggling to keep up with business as they were formally a non-profit which just became for-profit, and since getting business people to manage things, the company has quadrupled in employee number and revenue over the past few years. Right now they have about 200 phone counselors and they also support an R&D department with full-time MDs and PhDs doing tobacco research. Some of them came to talk to us and the things they said they were researching seemed to have little to do with company goals and possibly even conflictive to them, as one man spoke of using snus as an almost non-detrimental alternative to smoking or dipping and another criticized the company’s counseling techniques. I do not know if the company is open like this because it is new and naive or new and sensible.
I am hired through a temp agency and am going through eight weeks of training. For the first four weeks I will hardly take any calls, so of 160 work hours about 140 hours will be in the classroom. After that I get monitored, then monitored less, then on my own. The drill is to go through a checklist in normal improvised conversation and talk about whatever the person wants to talk about. I am supposed to guide them with questions so that the talk goes somewhere; most people behave but some are crazy.
For anyone with a psychology background this is an awesome job especially by comparison to other jobs in that field. It pays 14.50 an hour during the first 8 weeks of training, then 15.50 an hour for the first few months, then bonuses are available. A person is expected to take 1.5 calls an hour, so 12 in an 8-hour day. The bonuses are graduated in dollar increments up to 2.4 calls an hour, or about 19 in a shift, which pays $5 an hour bonus. This is considered a high-stress job because people are frequently emotional so if one does the math for 15-minute call time, then the relaxation time at the job becomes apparent. In a given day probably half the time is receiving incoming calls and the other half is using the computer automated dialer to find people for you, but either way there are lots of breaks in the work because the quit coaches must be fresh.
More than I like working at this place I like the training I am getting. It interests me greatly that a company can mass-produce employees in a few weeks to become convincing enough to guide strangers to change their lifestyles over the phone in brief conversations over a period of weeks. It really excites me to know that this method is tested and that it can easily be adapted into a commercial enterprise.
Free and Clear is the elite of all organizations doing this, and even still they have some sloppy practices. I suppose it cannot be helped and I am sure that they will become leaner and more efficient as time goes on, but they are in a bubble right now and I think they will continue to expand all aspects of operation for at least a couple of years.
I am glad I found them.