Human Resource Management in the Service Sector

Lectures 4 and 5: Call Centres

Nick Kinnie

Objectives

• Define call centres and understand the reasons for their growth

• Identify the key characteristics of the nature and management of call centres

• Analyse their forms of human capital and consider the implications for HR especially recruitment, selection and retention

• Examine recent changes in call centres especially the moves towards outsourcing and off-shoring

• Apply the 4 ID model to gain insights into the nature of work in call centres

(Refs: Deery and Kinnie, 2004; Korczynski, 2002, Frenkel et al, 1999, Homan, 2004)

Introduction

• Call centres are…– Fast growing and important sources of employment– Subject to controversy and attention – customer

service and movement of jobs

• and can be defined as…– Dedicated centres engaged in voice-to-voice contact– CSRs interact directly with customers– Involve use of sophisticated computer based systems– Monitoring the pace and quality of their work

Call centre images….

• They can be found in…– Private sector – customer service, sales and

telemarketing– Public sector – information, advice and support

• In different locations…– In-house– Outsourced– Off-shored

• And involve…– In-bound and outbound work

Why have they grown?

Pressures on call centresProduct market -

Customers and clients

Financial success – short and long term

Employment market – needs of employees

Call centre

(Maister, 2003)

Nature of call centre work: contrasting views

• ‘Assembly line in the head’ (Taylor and Bain, 1999)– Engineering/manufacturing model dominates– Jobs are divided up into small tasks which are

repeated– Technology exerts a powerful influence

especially in allocating work– Work is tightly controlled and routinised – use

of scripts

Manufacturing model

– Target setting, monitoring, measurement and feedback of both quantitative and qualitative (customer based) criteria

– Aim is to reduce skill level, improve efficiency and simplify procedures

– Leads to low skill, low pay jobs with few career prospects

Critiques of the engineering model

• Employees are the key point of contact – voice of the firm and quality of their service is critical

• Employees often need to exercise some discretion and be able to draw on variety of knowledge and skills

• Customer involvement always leads to some element of unpredictability

• (Frenkel, 1999)

Service model

• Firms use a series of HRM techniques in order to manage their employees– Careful recruitment and selective employment– Attention to training and development –

especially coaching– Sensitive performance management paying

attention to employee needs– Pay systems which are consistent with aims

of the business

Contradictions in call centre work

• Call centres have to be both efficient and provide a high quality service

• Both logics are important

• Customer oriented bureaucracy (Korczynski, 2002)

• ‘Fun and Surveillance’ (Kinnie et al, 2000)

• Segmentation of customers and of employees (Batt, 2002)

Links between CSR-customer interactions, HR practices and

business performance

High - RelationshipManagement

Low -Transaction

Cost minimisation High Commitment Management

Business performance

Pseudo-relationship

HR practices

CSR-customer interactions

Impact on employees

• Acknowledgement that employees play a key role in the delivery of the service – ‘the voice of the brand’

• Engage in emotional labour – expressing or suppressing emotions that they feel or do not feel

• Low autonomy and close supervision and monitoring associated with increased stress, burnout and emotional exhaustion – reduced employee well-being

• Effect on work-life balance – time and length of working hours

Employee reactions and responses

• Negative– Employee withdrawal from work – temporary or

permanent– Various forms of resistance – manipulating the

system to create ‘space’, disregarding the rules– Collective organisation – trade unionism

• Positive– Satisfaction from interaction with customers and peer

groups– Acceptance of performance monitoring– Well-being in some call centres compares favourably

with sales and manufacturing work (Holman, 2004)

Analysing call centres using the forms of capital/reactor model

• Use the reactor model to highlight the forms of capital within call centres

• Which are the most important forms of capital?

• How do they interact?

• What are the implications of this for HR practices especially recruitment, selection and retention?

IntellectualCapital

Human capital

Social capital

Structural capital

NetworkCapital

Client Capital

OrganizationalCapital

Forms of CapitalKnowledge skills and experience of staff

Knowledge embedded in values, culture and relationships

Ways of structuring work

Procedures, policies and processes

Knowledge of and relationships with clients

Knowledge of and relationships with network members

Human capital

Social capital

Structural capital

NetworkCapital

Client Capital

OrganizationalCapital

IntellectualCapital

Resourcing

Job and

Work D

esign

Trai

ning

and

Dev

elop

men

t

Pay and Reward

Perform

ance

Managem

ent

Invo

lvem

ent

Delivery

Strategy Structure

The HR Wheel

Kinnie et al 2006

Types of call centres

• In-house – part of a wider organisation

• Outsourced – giving some or all of the work to a third party

• Off-shore – where the work is carried out remotely – may be directly owned, joint venture or third party

Why outsource/off-shore call centre work?

• Reduce costs

• Improve efficiency

• Provide a buffer against demand fluctuations

• Give access to specialist knowledge and skills

Multiple sources of identity

• What are the key sources of identity in call centres?

• Which of these exert the most powerful pull on employees?

• What are the implications of this for HR practices?

• How can this analysis help us to understand the HR issues within the Norwich Union call centres?

Multiple sources of identity

Organisation

Client

Professional

Team

Employee

Conclusions

• Call centres are growing but face a series of conflicting pressures and tensions

• The reactor and 4 ID model can provide insights into the sources of these

• HR issues are often at the centre of these pressures, especially recruitment, selection and retention