Infosheet. Example Report with Commentary

Transcription

1 Infosheet Example Report with Commentary TITLE PAGE You must include a title page with your report. This should contain: Title of project Your name and/or student number Full name of your course (its degree title) Name of your Supervisor(s) Date of submission Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under

2 Abstract Call centres in Britain a future for them? Title Abstract This project has researched the current state of employment and working conditions in call centres in the UK generally, and Yorkshire in particular. It explored a prediction made in the late 1990s that job opportunities in Europe would be significantly reduced by the introduction of automatic voice response technology (AVR) and from competition from English-speaking countries elsewhere in the world, particularly India. Call centres in Britain have suffered from a poor image because of poor working conditions and low wages, and this report discusses how valid this image is today. A range of primary and secondary sources have been examined, and there is evidence to support the perception of poor working conditions in some call centres, particularly at the low end of the market. However, there is evidence too that employers recognise the need to recruit and retain a more specialised and professional workforce to change this image. The report concludes that, whilst there have been job losses from Britain, the impact of these has not been as great as predicted. Some work originally lost to overseas has returned to the UK, and call centres in Britain are increasingly seeking to specialise in high-end work and to employ operators with multi-language skills. Abstract: This should include: - the title of the project - a summary of its aims and outcome (in approximately 200 words)

3 Contents 1. Introduction 2. The rise of call centres 3. Call centres in Yorkshire 4. Work opportunities and working conditions in call centres 4.1 Work opportunities 4.2 Dark satanic mills? 5. The future for call centres 5.1 A bubble market 5.2 Revision of predictions 5.3 Multi-language skills 5.4 Globalisation 5.5 Uk offers a better service? 5.6 Same problems overseas 5.7 Specialisation the way forward? 6. Conclusion References Appendices

4 Call centres in Britain: a future for them? 1. Introduction This report briefly traces the history of call centres in the UK, and examines current work trends and conditions. In particular, it examines a prediction made in the late 1990s that call centres in Europe would lose out seriously, in terms of jobs, to call centres in English speaking countries in the Eastern hemisphere. As an example of current trends, it outlines call centre work opportunities in the Yorkshire region of Britain and discusses predicted opportunities over the next decade. I have analysed a range of primary and secondary sources to gather the data and information included in this report, and these are cited in the report and listed in the References section. Call centres are collective forms of teleworking, where a group of people work on non-domestic premises controlled by a third party. In addition to being called call centres, they may be called satellite offices, computer resources centres, or, increasingly, contact centres, and may use workers employed by the parent company and relocated in cheaper premises away from main HQ, or may use workers employed by organisations subcontracted to the parent company for particular tasks. 2. The rise of call centres Introduction This informs the reader what to expect and what the report is about. The parameters of the research are also outlined, in this example, these are geographical i.e. UK generally and Yorkshire in particular. Key terms are defined i.e. what a call centre is and distinguishes between different types of centre. The growth in call centres in the West was encouraged by economic and technological factors. From the late 1970s the growth of the service sector, particularly in consumer markets and financial services focused the attention of large organisations on the need to communicate with customers in a cost effective and streamlined way. This growth of a service sector economy connected with advances in computers and telecommunications. These technological developments combined with changes in working practices in Western companies. Routine clerical work was out-sourced to lower-waged countries or to domestic agencies, contractors and others in an attempt to lower labour costs. The logic of call centres was that a centralised approach and rationalisation of organisational operations would reduce costs, whilst producing a standard branded image to the world. The approach naturally lent itself to large companies with a large, distributed customer bases. Currently in Britain 800,000 people are employed in 4,000 call centres, but it is predicted that, despite a loss of jobs to India and elsewhere, by 2005 this will grow to a million workers (DTI 2014).

5 3. Call centres in Yorkshire Background stage The report moves on to focus on call centre development in Yorkshire, South and West, then concentrates on one location: Bradford. This part of the report is fairly descriptive statistics and facts are presented to the reader with minimal analysis. In South Yorkshire, there has been large investment in call centre development, encouraged by EU regional development. Around 6,000 operators are already employed with companies such as Ventura (3,750 staff), Selflex (1,000) and One-2-One (300); in Doncaster, BT Cellnet employs 900 staff at its call centre (PSU 2016). In West Yorkshire, twenty-five call centres had established in Leeds by 2015, employing around 15,000 people and occupying 10% of office space available in the city. Around a third of the Leeds call centres are within traditional single company financial services (banking & building societies) and the remainder offer a range of services to their clients, including retail sales, mobile phones services and road breakdown services (Jones 2016). In Bradford, by 2014, around 7,000 people were employed in call centres, and this was expected to rise to 10,000 within five years (Davis 2015). The Bradford Call Centre Training Unit, jointly funded by Bradford Training & Enterprise Council and Bradford Council, plays a key role in training unemployed people to work in call centres. Major employers with call centres in the city included at that time: Abbey NatWest Yorkshire Building Society Green Flag. 4. Work opportunities and working conditions in call centres Development stage The report starts to look at the way work is organised in call centres. Here, this example starts to become more analytical. 4.1 Work opportunities Types of calls are often divided into outbound and inbound. Inbound calls are calls that are initiated by the customer to obtain information, report a malfunction or ask for help. This is substantially different from outbound calls where the agent initiates the call to a customer mostly with the aim to sell a product or a service to that customer. Staff in call centre are often organized in tiers, with the first tier being largely unskilled workers who are trained to resolve issues using a simple script. If the first tier is unable to resolve an issue the issue is escalated to a more highly skilled second tier. In some cases, there may be third or higher tiers of support.

6 A trend originally observed in the US is also becoming apparent in Britain: of a high and a low end to the services provided. The characteristics of employment at both ends of this spectrum can be summarised (see table 1). Tables and charts are a good, visual way to present information. High End Call Centre Services Usually involving detailed financial services advice, information and sales Staff recruited for their knowledge and expertise in these areas Training of staff a high priority Emphasis on retaining staff Staff reasonably well-paid Low End Call Centre Services Operators require little technical knowledge Generally perform a customer service role, typically within travel, retail and leisure industries May involve cold selling Staff not particularly well paid Turnover of staff as high as 80% Table 1: Summary of employment characteristics of high and low end call centre services. Discussion stage (1) The level of analysis increases as the discussion moves away from describing the external features of call centres to look at working conditions in them. The report presents the reasons why problems have arisen, but tries to balance the criticism with acknowledgement that call centres recognise they have a problem and need to do something about it. 4.3 Dark Satanic Mills? A report from Income Data Services (IDS 2010) found large variations in pay and work in UK call centres. This was emphasised in a report commissioned in 2015 by the Health and Safety Executive that suggested some UK call centres should be compared to Victorian 'dark satanic mills'. The research, carried out by the Health and Safety Laboratory in Sheffield, found that employees at the worst call centres felt powerless and tied to their desks. Many complained that low wages, poor working conditions and repetitive tasks led to poor job satisfaction and high levels of depression (Management Issues 2015). It would appear that where the dominant focus in any call centre is on answering calls as quickly as possible, the stress levels rise. The complaints by customers about call centre services include those of the length of time in queues, automated menu systems, premium rate lines, having to communicate with staff confined to scripts and the lack of continuity of contact with operators between calls. These quality related problems appear to have risen for a number of reasons: The call centre industry is unregulated and no independent body exists to represent the views of consumers. Call centres often try to match the number of available operators with the volume of calls coming in, but often the number of calls exceeds this, which results in long queues. Some call centres judge operators on the number of calls they take, and set unrealistic targets so customer service suffers.

7 Call centre operators are often given a script, which is meant to cover all possible scenarios, so are unable to give an answer to an unscripted query. Operators at offshore call centres do not necessarily have the knowledge of UK culture and language to answer every customer query (BBC 2014). However, there appears to be an increasing recognition of the need for UK call centres to improve the quality of customer experiences. Many businesses are now judged by customers on the quality of service they receive from its call centre. In a competitive situation, a customer who has had a poor experience is likely to take their business elsewhere. 5. The future for call centres in Britain 5.1 A bubble market? At one time in the recent past, the call centre industry in Europe was dubbed a bubble market after a study into the future of call centres by the London based economic consultants, Business Strategies, warned that the growth of Internet and automatic voice response technology will make call centre operators redundant (Business Strategies, 2010). Another communications company, the OTR Group, suggested around the same time, that one in five jobs in all call centres in Europe would disappear over the next decade (Financial Times 2017). The increasing use of automatic voice response technology (AVR) was thought to reduce the need for direct operator interventions, and that the growth of Internet sales would reduce operator-customer contacts. Discussion stage (2) The report moves to another discussion phase. 5.2 Revision of predictions However, in recent years this prediction has been revised. AVR Question technology is currently unpopular with many callers, who often prefer more human interaction. In Britain, the Yorkshire and How could the Tyneside accents are popular with callers from within the UK and report have been from other countries, and call centres report that customers from enhanced or other countries, particularly the USA, are noticeably inclined to developed in subsection 5? lengthen their call times to engage Northern British operators in friendly discussion. In Bradford, for example, the city has continued to buck the trend seen in other cities where jobs have been lost to other English speaking countries overseas. Bradford is still seen as an attractive location for call centre employers because of the Bradford Council s own training centre and because of the large ethnically mixed labour force. 5.3 Multi-language skills Asian and Eastern European language speaking call centre operators are particularly in demand to communicate with customers who speak no English. The relative low cost of commercial property and lower wages, compared to the South of England, is also cited as attractive factor with employers, and particularly with the public sector.

8 5.4 Globalisation Another more serious potential threat to many UK call centre jobs comes with the increasing globalisation of work. The opportunities presented for rapid communications today has prompted multinational companies to subcontract work to countries in English speaking countries South East Asia. In July 2013, the market intelligence company, Key Note, predicted that that by 2018 the UK would lose 97,000 call centre jobs to the Indian sub-continent (Logistics 2014). British Telecom gets much of its data entry work done in India and British Airways has established a call centre in Bombay to handle its bookings ( Davis 2015). 5.5 UK offers a better service? It is certainly true that UK call centre jobs have been lost as employers look to cut costs and relocate overseas. However, USDAW (2014), one of the main trade unions for employees in the call centre industry, has drawn attention to a better service it feels customers receive from UK call centres. In two studies, of 290 UK call centre directors and managers, and of 44 Indian call centre operation: Discussion stage (3) A key element of critical analysis is to be cautious about accepting findings from any research, particularly if bias is suspected. The student draws attention to the source of the research (USDAW), who have a particular interest in retaining jobs in the UK. On average, UK agents answer 25 per cent more calls each hour than their Indian counterparts, and resolve 17 per cent more of these calls first time; UK call centre workers tend to stay with their company for well over three years, while the burn out rates in this 1 billion a year industry in India are extremely high, with an estimated one in three workers quitting within a year. More than a third of callers to India have to ring back at least a second time (UK has a first-time resolution rate of over 90 per cent); Almost a third of Indian call centres do not measure customer satisfaction, while very few perform any pro-active quality checking. These findings do need however, to be considered in relation to their source. The Union of Shop, Distribution & Allied Workers (USDAW) has an interest in retaining call centre work in the UK for the benefit of its members, and other surveys from less biased sources are needed to test the findings. 5.6 Same problems overseas It does appear, however, that the call centre industry in India appears now to be encountering some of the same problems that emerged in the West in the late 1990s and is now finding it harder to retain workers as the economy in these countries strengthens. Operators working at a distance from customers are also likely to feel remote from them, both culturally and in terms of geographical knowledge. There is no shared understanding of place and society that often implicitly underpins discussion between people from similar geographical backgrounds. The limited service-focused The student seeks to nature of the discussion does little to foster this understanding and broaden the communication (Logistics 2014). discussion by trying to understand why problems occur in overseas call centres.

9 5.7 Specialisation the way forward? The recent DTI report suggests that the expansion of call centre services in the UK is likely to be in the realm of specialisation, with UK call centre operators increasingly offering a more informed advisory and information services. UK operators are also likely to be expected to use a wider range of communication technology, than operators in other countries (DTI 2014). A likely scenario for the future of call centres globally is one where call centres use a mixture of operator services and electronic systems, including the Internet. By 2020, it is estimated that 900 million people worldwide will be using the Internet and already a quarter of UK call centres have staff dealing with communications from customers. Developments, such as Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) and Internet provision, enable call centres to diversify their products and services and enables call centres to offer support services to the online retail market. Call centre staff will need to develop more advanced computer skills in the future and are likely to communicate both by and verbally with customers. Another possible scenario is where call centres in Britain and India work together in an integrated way, with calls being referred immediately from India to colleagues in Britain, if a more UK based operator was deemed more suited to manage the enquiry in question. 6. Conclusion The report moves towards a conclusion with a prediction of what might happen in the future, based on a UK government (DTI) report. Conclusion The report attempts to summarise some of the key points that were made earlier in the report. Given too, the dominance of English in the world, the future for call centres in Britain is certainly not as gloomy as predicted in the late 1990s, provided that call centres respond to the need for more personal, less-anonymous, more responsive and multicommunication modes of contact with customers. There is a particularly need too, in Britain, to offer more specialist bi-lingual services to customers and particularly to offer Asian language and Eastern European services to customers in ethnically diverse areas. As mentioned earlier, employment opportunities in Bradford are likely to be sustained for this reason.

10 References BBC (2014) Brassed Off Britain: Call Centres Accessed 9 March Davis (2015) Improving call centre efficiency. London: Palgrave. DTI (2014) The UK Contact Centre Industry: A study. London: Department for Trade and Industry. IDS (2010) Incomes Accessed 20 March Jones (2016) Analysing service work in West Yorkshire. Fields Institute Journal 3 (8), Logistics (2014) Market indicators Accessed 10 March Management Issues (2015) Call Centres are Modern Day Satanic Mills Accessed 2 March 2017.