A CASE1 OF SURVEILLANCE AND HR PRACTICES IN A CALL CENTRE Paul Thompson
Tele-BankCo is a financial services typical call centre based in central Scotland, handling mostly low-end queries and transactions, and using automatic call distribution (ACD) software. It is a surveillance-intensive environment: The ACD allows you to have any size team you like and on the screens you can actually see right down to the person on the phone, you can see it in teams, in management groups, and so on. You can produce macros every day of the different levels of management, either down at rep level to site level. So you can if you want to, compare the performance of teams across the sites, site against site or individual against individual. (Manager) Like many call centres, it suffers from high turnover and a degree of burnout. Some managers seem to welcome this, one commenting that: To me attrition is very healthy in a call centre, very costly, but very healthy. Because of the stressful nature of the job and because you want these people to keep constant energy and enthusiasm, it does the organisation some good if you can pump in some fresh blood. (Manager) However, this was not the dominant view of how management should handle the tensions between quantity and quality in a low discretion–high commitment environment (see previous section).

There was a strong focus on standard HR tolls of recruitment, selection and training as a partial ‘solution’. Matching the job to the people was seen primarily in terms of recruiting particular types of people – those with bubbly personalities, or as one manager put it: The vast majority of these people in customer services centres, we are talking 99 per cent, are not bankers, they’ve been recruited for their personalities and communication skills. The perceived centrality of social skills and competencies has led management at Tele-BankCo to use rigorous selection and training procedures more usually associated with high discretion jobs. As part of the recruitment process Tele-BankCo utilises telephone interviews, role plays and two-person structured interviews. Less than 10 per cent of those who apply are selected for a place on the six-week full-time training programme. Though there is some emphasis on technical skills such as navigating screens and product knowledge, the vast amount of time is spent on social competencies. At the heart of this is a conversation cycle to teach customer service representatives (CSRs) how to build rapport with people. Not only does this include managing a conversation but ‘managing yourself’. Essentially, employees are taught rudimentary techniques associated with emotional labour – scripted interactions (via ‘cookery cards’), voice and tone control and elicitation of responses from customers. This is backed up by a set of 19 core standards of behaviour, such as ‘maintaining appropriate standards of behaviour, dress and appearance’; ‘pleasant and enthusiastic with customers’ and ‘welcoming feedback and apologising when mistakes have been made’.

Not only are these core standards continually present throughout training (with each of the 19 printed on laminated cards and pasted to the walls and doors of the training room) they are often used in evaluating performance. However, interviews with CSRs revealed major discrepancies with how management saw the role. CSRs were much more likely to associate job requirements with surviving stressful and repetitive work, rather than applying a particular set of personality characteristics to the enthusiastic pursuit of customer service: I can see it [building rapport] is important, but most customers just want to come on and get their query dealt with, they don’t really care whether you’re they’re best friend with them at the end of the call. (CSR) They also consistently raised the surveillance through statistics as an obstacle to high-quality customer service: What they don’t tell you when you come to the interview is the emphasis they put on stats. They are very statistics oriented – how long your average call is, your average wrap time . . . the emphasis in the call centre and other call centres is on the number of calls, the quality of the calls, yes, but not this rapport thing. (CSR) This led to some CSRs either considering quitting, ‘closing down’, or going ‘off script’: They [CSRs] are all different personalities, but they’re trying to mould them into a Tele-BankCo person. Like robots, and they’re always pushing, pushing, and if they keep pushing, I’ll be out of the door soon.

My way of handling it is coming in and saying to myself, ‘I do my shift from 2 to 10, it’s not a career; it’s a job. I answer the phone and that’s it’. By not looking for anything more than that, that’s my way of handling it. When I first came in, I thought it was maybe just me, but speaking to other people it’s the same. We get a lot of people who are on their own, they’re pensioners. They ask for a balance, and then they will want a chat – ‘what’s the weather like?’ I’m quite happy to chat to them, but it’s always in the back of your mind, got to watch my average handling time. I think you’re setting a better example for the bank. (CSR) What can be seen from the case is that the sociotechnical system used in call centres tends to reproduce rather than resolve the quality–quantity, low discretion– high commitment tensions, limiting the effectiveness of the investment in sophisticated HR tools.
Questions
1 As the senior HR manager at Tele-BankCo, you are asked by the bank’s call centre executive to evaluate whether it would be more rational to drop the investment in sophisticated recruitment and selection and accept the current rate of attrition. Set out your response by presenting a short memo to senior management.
2 What kind of measures could be made to redesign the socio-technical system to put less emphasis on surveillance and statistics? (refer back to the previous section on call centres).