THE LABOUR MARKET AND EMPLOYMENT

A maturing industry

The growth of the contact centre industry has been rapid and has occurred in an ad hoc manner. The result is that it has o en lacked the maturity and integrated nature found with more established industries. Until more recently this meant that there was no clear career structure; no specific qualifications; and no fully coordinated industry representation. Organizations would mostly use in-house training to ensure quality because there were no clear means to understand or benchmark external provision.

Another implication of the lack of industry structure was that those organizations providing good quality training had little incentive to encourage developments beyond their gates. There were also other shortcomings including a low-cost approach to recruitment and training, and poaching of good employees by organizations that had weaker or nonexistent training and development departments.

Enlightened self-interest gradually emerged as it became recognized that organizations could not advance without joint action. In Britain, there was also a governmental recognition that the industry needed supportive guidance to prevent the haemorrhaging of jobs overseas because of ineffective self-regulation. The Department for Education and Skills commissioned the CCA Research Institute to investigate the area and it was acknowledged that there was a need for ‘the skills equivalent of “Keynesian Pump Priming”’.

Spurred on by a number of reports about contact centres relocating offshore, the Department of Trade and Industry  commissioned a report, The UK Contact Centre Industry: A study. Some of the findings that specifically relate to skills and training are presented belo

Support and opportunity for developing skills and education relevant to contact centre work is not well understood throughout the industry. Contact centres should be encouraged to improve their knowledge about standards and development tools available to them. 

In order to move up the value chain, the existing workforce needs to improve a wide variety of skills and capabilities. There is the need to coordinate, promote and encourage existing and new contact centre training and qualifications relevant to the businesses which go from pre-job training up to senior contact centre management. 

Through skills, training, qualifications and advice, contact centres must be helped from focusing purely on call handling, towards the more complete and valuable action of customer contact management.

The need for more training is widely felt, and although some detailed skills and qualifications frameworks have been put in place recently, the industry needs to be encouraged and educated in how best to use them. Some businesses do not support qualifications which improve – rather than develop – employees’ skills, as they fear this will only make the employees more a ractive to other organizations.