This report aims to provide a general overview of work in call centres.

Call centres are designed as 'operations in which a managed group of people spends most of their time doing business by phone, usually working in a computer-supported environment'.

The basic tenet is that work in call centres has to be conceptualised in terms of distributed knowledge. This means that only part of the knowledge needed to carry out any transaction is (or rather has to be) in the mind of the operator, and important knowledge may be distributed among colleagues in the organisation, available and accessible cognitive artefacts in the work environment, and clients.

Operators in call centres are knowledge workers, because they carry out any activity by manipulating internal and external knowledge.

The report first illustrates the evolution of technologies, functions and competencies.

There have been four phases in the evolution of call centres since the first one was opened.

The original call centre in the 1960s was a claims office with a toll-free phone line that answered standard requests. Agents had limited knowledge and basic communication skills.

Later, in the 1970s and 1980s, claim factories were served by Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) systems that handled a large number of mostly repetitive requests. Operators had limited, specialist knowledge and a few restricted communication skills; stress was high and the agent had to cope with a quantitative cognitive workload.

During the 1990s, the call centre became a communication node dedicated to customised interactions, in which the process of communication was dynamic and long-lasting, and whose objective was customer care and retention. Operators were supported by the integration of computer and telecommunication technologies (CTI), and had good communication skills.

The virtual call centre and selling node will be next: it combines previous ACD, CTI and new Interactive Voice Responder (IVR) technologies with web-based communication, and takes the form of a learning, marketing, negotiating and selling node. The Web-Enabled Call Centre (WECC) evolves in the virtual call centre, where customers are mainly web-site visitors, and incorporates access to agents via call-back, voice-over Internet protocol (VoIP) and text chat. It is predicted that by 2004, WECCs will be central to organisations (Intranet), across supply chains (Extranet), and with the online population (Internet).

The report then considers people in call centres.

Call centres are among the most rapidly growing forms of employment. In Europe, 1.3% of the total European workforce (i.e. 2m people) will be employed in the call centres by 2002. North European countries have the highest call centre concentration with southern Europe falling far behind; the figures for eastern Asia and Australia are very similar, and in the USA, more than 5m of new jobs have been created in this sector since 1990. On average, call centres are growing at something like 30-35% per annum in terms of call volumes, and 20-25% per annum in terms of the number of agents. According to some estimates, 1 in 20 jobs in the USA nowadays are in call centres, and by the year 2005 that figure may have risen to 1 in 7.

However, the crucial point is not the number of people in call centres, but the fact that people are critical to their success.

Research and surveys alike confirm that human resources form the strategic factor that makes all the difference in managing the customer relationship. The customer-focused culture is the main asset when seeking competitiveness and getting the most out of the customer relation. Technology can support, but never replace, human resources skilled in communications, problem-solving and caring.

Although companies are aware of the central role of human resources, they seldom pay the necessary attention to the training, retention and career development of agents. All surveys of call centres in EU member states reveal symptoms of organisational disease including high turnover, workload and stress.

Notwithstanding suggestions for improving human resources management, some paradoxes are apparent:

• agents work alone in their relationship with clients, and technology and organisation do not adequately support the communication flow
• standards of education are usually high, but they are managed according to the paradigm of the traditional 'blue collar' industrial worker; moreover, agents do not possess an integrated view of the process: about the half of them do not even know the objective of the call centre they work for
• call centres themselves are isolated from the rest of the organisation, and there is little contact with the sales and marketing departments

There is a need for to integrate and develop the technology, organisation, performance, jobs and quality of work, and for people to be seen as the hub that allows the call centre to become a learning organisation.

This is followed by a report on data and trends on people and call centres in the EU: the report focuses on key features in Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the UK. Reference is also made to the growth of pan-European multi-lingual call centres in some European countries.

The report also examines issues to be tackled in the near future:

• Work organisation: call centres are usually designed on the model of a factory. Given the evolution of call centres, work organisation should support collaborative forms and tools including the development and sharing of organisational memories.
• Training: call centres are the largest work group with no training programme. Training and retraining packages are both unusual and too general.
• Career development: since call centres are 'flat' organisations, vocational development is rare, and has consisted so far of considerable horizontal mobility from one organisation to another. Such mobility masks the lack of a career development path, and of intra-organisational mobility.
• Health: stress symptoms are frequent as because people have no experience of the work, and no cognitive or emotional tools for coping with strains and tension.
• Monitoring and surveillance: the technology in use is much the same throughout the world, and includes a facility for continuous monitoring of performance. The mechanisms of surveillance and monitoring contribute to stress, and there are also legal and ethical factors involved.
• Localisation: call centres are usually located where a skilled workforce is available at low cost because of the rate of unemployment or the need to enter (students) or re-enter (women) the labour market. This may reduce flexibility in the medium term.
• Industrial relations: concrete experience of developing a local and global framework for industrial relations has been building up over the last few years. Workers in the call centres all over the world raise identical issues of pay and benefits, stress, working time and workload, equal opportunities and training, harassment at work, poor working environment and equipment, respect and proper consultation, and social benefits.

In conclusion, call centres and teleworking have reached a cross-over point. Since the former is now becoming 'virtual', it will now enter the phase of 'networked distance labour' and share the same socio-economic context. Steps must therefore be taken to open up a new phase of industrial relations in which more active attention is paid to individual workers.

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