Work Organization, Control and the Experience of Work in Call Centres

Abstract

Despite the integration of telephone and VDU technologies, call centres are not uniform in terms of work organization. It is suggested that diversity can best be understood by reference to a range of quantitative and qualitative characteristics. Consequently, perspectives that treat all call centres as if they were the same hybrids of customization and routinization are rejected, along with over-optimistic interpretations of labour control over work organization. Empirical evidence from nine `workflows' in two call centres - an established financial sector organization and a rapidly growing outsourced operation - provide excellent grounds for an examination of similarity and difference. A picture emerges of workflows which are volume-driven and routinized, involving low levels of employee discretion, and, by contrast, those less dominated by quantitative criteria offering higher levels of operator discretion and an emphasis on the quality of customer service. Despite these distinctions, larger numbers of operators report an experience of work which is driven by quantitative imperatives, most manifest in the pervasive implementation of targets. Targets are also used increasingly to assess and mould the quality of the call centre operator's interaction with the customer. Overall, the evidence casts doubt on the optimistic perspective that call centre work, in time, will come to resemble `knowledge work'.

New perspectives on language and gender: Linguistic prescription and compliance in call centres

“…In both call centres, and in accordance with call centres in general (Taylor et al 2002), targets exist for both 'hard' and 'soft' aspects of the work, the attainment of which is consequential for bonuses and career advancement, so there is clearly an incentive to try to meet the targets. Hard targets relate to how many calls an agent should take during a workday, how quickly calls should be answered, and their maximum duration.…”

“…The Danish call centre is in the telecommunications industry, and the Scottish one is in the financial services sector. On a spectrum ranging from complex to routine calls (Taylor, Hyman, Mulvey, & Bain 2002), both call centres receive a combination, with some calls dealing with technically complex pension funds or mobile phone issues and others with routine matters such as updating customer details. The proportion of female agents at Thistle is close to the industry average of 61%.…”

“…These skills are encoded in institutional documents of various kinds, such as call assessment scorecards, customer service manuals, and communication training material (print and online); they are reinforced in communication training, call assessments, and performance reviews. Call centres vary in the degree to which they pre-specify the service interaction (Taylor et al 2002). The material at Mermaid and Thistle, which is remarkably similar across national contexts (see Hultgren 2011), is less specific than a 'script' in that it doesn't specify every word, but more specific than a series of 'prompts' in that it does give examples of utterances and words that agents should (and should not) use (see Cameron 2000).…”

Control and social relations in a small contact-centre

“…This strand in the literature emphasised the cost-reduction or profit-maximising logic. It recognised that while there are differing levels of heterogeneity in contact-centres, Taylorised production-line call centres proliferate within Anglo-Saxon economies Bain and Taylor, 2000;Houlihan, 2002;Taylor and Bain, 1999;Taylor et al, 2002;Wickham and Collins, 2004) and even within developing economies, like India (Taylor and Bain, 2006). The Taylorist argument is also supported by the contact-centre management models proposed by Batt and Moynihan (2002) and Hutchinson et al (2000).…”

Lean Manufacturing in Public Services: Prospects for Value Creation

“…However, managerial practices and organizational structures conventionally implemented in call centres across the service industry can inhibit the development of a rewarding job experience for employees. This is due to standardised work procedures, monitored dialogue [29] [30], mechanisation of customer-employee contact and an emphasis on quantity statistics and targets over the quality of interaction [5] [31]. As a result employees possess reduced levels of affective commitment in such environment.…”