Call Centre Work

A Marxist investigation into the forms of resistance occurring in the UK call centre today

This Special Issue is concerned with the working conditions at call centres, which harbour jobs of different levels of qualification.

Indian call centre employees work through the night, sleep during the day, and listen to foreign voices in accented tongues over transnational telephone connections. Through a description of the nightly and daily lives of call centre workers in the university town of Pune, India, 1–800–Worlds engages with the complex negotiations that underlie the ostensible success of new service economies. As the author shows, the call centre industry is neither insular nor singular but offers a set of symptoms that can help read changing forms of urban Indian middle-classness.

Tips on making your call center a genuine profit center In North America, call centers are a $13 billion business, employing 4 million people. For managers in charge of a call center operation, this practical, user-friendly guide outlines how to improve results measurably, following its principles of revenue generation, efficiency, and customer satisfaction. In addition, this new edition addresses many industry changes, such as the new technology that's transforming today's call center and the location-neutral call center. It also helps readers determine whether it's cost-efficient to outsource operations and looks at the changing role and requirements of agents. The ultimate call center guide, now revised and updated The authors have helped over 60 companies improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their call center operations Offers comprehensive guidance for call centers of all sizes, from 20-person operations to multinational businesses With the latest edition of Call Centers For Dummies, managers will have an improved arsenal of techniques to boost their center's bottom line.

Over the past ten years there has been a massive growth in call centres worldwide. These centres are said to represent the most dynamic growth area in white-collar employment internationally since the mid 1990s. Yet the footloose and global nature of the industry means that jobs will always be susceptible to outsourced operations, ICT developments, public sector subsidization of business restructuring and re-location, and cheaper operations elsewhere. This book conducts a thorough analysis of this modern phenomenon.

This is the only book available today that provides a very readable, step-by-step guide for managing an incoming call center. The book combines theory with practical advice and is filled with over 100 charts and graphs, several case studies and an extensive glossary and index. Readers will learn how to: achieve service level with quality in an era of more transactions, growing complexity and heightened caller expectations; understand the "how" behind best practices; boost caller satisfaction; win top management's support; and discover what separates a good call center from a great one.

This book examines the concept of globalised identities and the way in which agency is exercised over identity construction by women working in India’s transnational call centre industry. Drawing on qualitative empirical data and extensive original fieldwork, the book provides a nuanced analysis of the experiences of Indian women call centre workers and the role of women’s participation in the global labour market. The author uses social, cultural, and historical factors to create a framework for examining the processes of identity construction. Within this framework, the book explores the impact of the call centre labour process on the social landscape of urban centres in India and the way in which this has impacted upon transformations and shifts in society with relation to gendered, sexual, and generational relationships. Highlighting the significance of identity in a globalised world, the author argues that identity acts as one of the most powerful constructs in transforming global ‘scapes’ and flows of culture and economics. This book will be of interest to academics working on South Asia, gender and labour studies and issues of globalization, identity and social change.

We are in the age of the empowered customer. There are more and more customer choices, greater and greater demands on organizations. Your Customers want to contact you utilizing an ever-growing number of channels, but still expect a continual and contextual conversation with you throughout their journey. The expectations from your customer is no longer to just resolve their issues on the first try, but instead to anticipate their next need. The stakes for customer facing organizations are getting higher and higher. Fortunately, there are more opportunities today to delight customers than at any time in history. In my book, I make the case that customer experience is not just a differentiator – it is the reason your organization exists. Profits and long-term growth are by-products of delighting customers. Whether you support customers through a call center or you are an army of one you will learn how to create an environment that is intentional about delighting customers. We will explore the three vital components to achieve this – liberating structures, data driven technology and empowered people. The Curated Experience: Engineering Customer Service to Build Loyalty teaches us that it is about intentionally crafting a better Customer Experience.