Towards Telework 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,...
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