Call and contact centres

All of us use call and contact centres – often on a daily basis. Phoning a bank, insurance company or major retailer, or receiving a survey, a suggestion that yet another satellite TV subscription channel would offer untold delights, or even a credit card statement probably involves such a centre. They can operate 24/7, and handle anything from a request for an account statement to a highly complex financial software problem.

Call and contact centres are big business, and the difference between them is simply that agents (workers) in call centres just work using telephones, while those in contact centres manage all forms of communication. Both operate either in-house for a large company or as a separate, outsourced (sub-contracted) function. In either case, the agents are the first point of contact between the organisation and the public, with the latter either making general enquiries or specific ones relating to some product or service provided by the organisation.

There are hardly any call centres these days because it is now imperative for organisations to use contact centres to handle all forms of communication and to deal with clients through whatever medium they have selected. Numbers of call and contact centres in the UK are set to rise to 8,000 by 2005. The industry employs 800,000 people (over 3 per cent of the working population) and is growing at 22 per cent a year. This figure is expected to reach one million by 2005. Over 3 million calls are made daily to centres during office hours.

Annual staff turnover can approach 50 per cent and this costs the industry over £1 billion each year. There are plans to reduce this figure through developing a professional career route in the sector, by investing in people, by improved skills training and by publicising the benefits of employment in this field. Other pressures come from greatly reduced overseas costs, although some companies have recently declared that levels of customer satisfaction are far greater with British-based centres.

Clearly, the technology running these centres is complex and sophisticated. All relevant records from all sources must be available to the agent dealing with a customer. The agent has to be aware of previous phone calls, faxes, e-mails and the like, and to be able to refer to them, as well as details of the problem or enquiry. These details must be displayed accurately, and in a form that is easy to understand.

Contact centres in the Services

There are no contact centres in the Services, although many people become involved in dealing with enquiries, answering phone calls, letter, faxes and e-mails, and even managing websites. However, doing this uninterrupted for a full working day is a little different, as is the technology employed in centres and the self-disciplined responses required from agents. Not everyone can ‘deliver 180 seconds of bubbly personality 120 times a day, particularly around the peak 10am time slot.’

Many of the management skills involved in running a centre or a section within one will be familiar to the Service leaver. Indeed many of the attributes needed to work in this employment area may be found in Service clerical and signals specialists. Formal sales training can help because much contact centre work involves sales techniques, and Service leavers should recognise this as an expanding field of opportunity.

Employment

Contact centres operate all over the world and it is not uncommon for a British consumer talking with a British company actually to be telephoning somewhere in mainland Europe … or the USA … or India. Centres can be established anywhere that can provide the necessary communications infrastructure, workforce, technological support and reliability. Employers can take advantage of relatively high unemployment and government grants when they establish their operations. The UK currently has 37 per cent of Europe’s contact centres but competition threatens this position in the market.

The main jobs in the contact centre industry include:

- customer services adviser

- customer services team leader

- sales adviser

- sales team leader

- product specialist

- scheduling/resource manager

- operations/contact centre manager.

Contact centres are no longer enormous sweatshops with poorly paid, untrained staff working in hot airless barn-like buildings. Agents nowadays may deal with finance, travel, hospitality, banking, marketing and retail using the telephone, Internet, e-mail, SMS messaging, fax and post.

Large companies will have their own operations – controlled and managed by their own employees and with agents dealing solely with their own products or services. Becoming employed by them will follow a similar route to becoming employed in any other capacity.

Other centres are operated by specialist companies. In these operations, agents may represent several different organisations, depending on the contract between the centre and the organisation hiring its services.

Some centre operations support the major activity of the organisation; in others, like catalogue sales, football pools, holidays and airline ticketing, the centre is the way that the business reaches its public. In any case, agents are likely to be critical points of contact for the business, so they act as representatives and must behave accordingly.

There is concern about stress and monotony working in this industry, but the same legislation on issues like Health & Safety applies as in any other working environment. However, the combined effect of using desk, screen, voice, headset and mouse under pressure is still perhaps not fully appreciated and not well understood.

Agents may work on inbound or outbound calling, or both (which is called blending). They deal with anything from the stupid to the expert and need resilience and a sense of humour. Some centres will have a fairly constant volume of activity; others experience dramatic peaks and troughs, involving rapid employment of temporary staff.

Training and qualifications

People skills and basic skills are important, with recruits expected to demonstrate the following.

- Communication skills:

– speaking

– listening

– writing.

- Technology skills:

– PC and keyboard

– telephony.

- Professional skills:

– attention to detail

– numeracy

– relationship building

– customer service ethos.

- Personal aptitudes:

– integrity

– initiative

– self-motivation

– stamina

– credibility

– confidence

– positive attitude

– tolerance

– learning ability

– empathy.

The Call Centre Management Association (CCMA) represents contact centre managers and supervisors, or independent consultants engaged in call centre planning, implementation or training. It assists in sourcing high-quality training courses, and ‘is working with e-skills UK to unite employers, educators and government around a common set of strategic objectives [to] address the skills needs of the UK call/contact centre industry’.

The Call Centre Association (CCA) represents:

- companies operating contact centres

- organisations involved in the industry’s development

- public-sector bodies with an interest in the industry.

As well as accrediting in-house training schemes, it has developed qualifications with industry including:

- Certificate in Telephone Banking

- Diploma in Call Centre Management

- Professional Development Award in Call Handling

- Awareness Workshop for Supervisors and Team Leaders.

e-skills UK is the e-skills Sector Skills Council for people involved in electronic business. Through its Call2Contact business unit it is developing National Occupational Standards as part of a career and skills framework. The standards have already generated the following NVQs:

- Call Handling Operations Level 2

- Call Handling Operations Level 3

- Supervising Call Handling Level 3

- Managing Call Handling Level 4.

The first two NVQs also form part of Modern Apprenticeships in Call Handling at Foundation and Advanced levels respectively.

The Institute of Customer Service (as the now-defunct National Training Organisation in a sector that does not yet have a Sector Skills Council) has developed both a Foundation and Advanced Modern Apprenticeship in Customer Service. They include Core Skills and units taken from a variety of other NVQs, including its own NVQ/SVQ in Customer Service, available at Levels 2, 3 and 4 – although the latter is not part of the Modern Apprenticeship system. Although not solely aimed at contact centre staff, these qualifications are highly relevant for anybody in contact with the public in general and customers in particular.

The Direct Marketing Association is a trade organisation representing direct marketing employers’ interests, with telemarketing being one of these areas. It is not a provider of qualifications, but its code of conduct makes it likely that its members adhere to at least the minimum standards expected in the industry.