A DESKILLED OCCUPATION? | Call Center

Contact centres are designed to act as the interface between the customer and the organization and to handle high volumes of calls each day. To do so systematically, economically and with consistent quality, most organizations have tended to incorporate mechanisms that limit the freedom of the operator. This approach tends to standardize processes, language, etc and restrict the scope of the customer service adviser.

With standardization the organization determines the messages it wants communicating to the customer and gets the operator to deliver the words. It has been argued that the use of scripts and information technology has restructured the organization of work to reduce not only the skills of agents but also their need to think. Essentially, ‘The agent is largely constructed as a mouth-piece rather than a brain’.

In Canada the requirement to follow specific protocols in telephone health assessment has been considered to be classical Taylorism in which the nurses’ skills were dissociated from the labour process. ‘This provides evidence of the fragmentation of knowledge and its separation into “parcels” or “bits” which are coordinated through the system’s algorithm-based logic’.

A lots have argued that the systematization of work in call centres has minimized the requirements for skills. For example, some banks would appear to have created a deskilled workforce that does not require qualifications and can be trained in just three weeks. It would appear that the opportunities for skill enhancement are limited and concluded that, ‘Our findings in this area indicate overwhelmingly that the nature of work organization used in call centres acts toconstrain skill development.’ The reduction of skill demands has other implications: ‘This has the result that many formerly semi-professional jobs have been eroded and made redundant, introducing a loss of career, status and opportunity’.

If only a few of the above points of view are correct there would appear to be problems in some call centres. Importantly, it should not fall upon training and human resource professionals to use learning and development as a ‘sticking plaster’ remedy to cover over gaping wounds caused by some organizational policies and methods. Where there are evident shortcomings in the system that training cannot overcome it is the role of HR and other operational managers to argue the case for a redesign of the system. If this cannot be achieved, the lack of insight and vision elsewhere in the organization will be rewarded with lower productivity, less motivation and higher levels of attrition.