Thankfully, not everyone considers the negative views expressed above as a full and accurate picture of call centres. Some researchers said, ‘We would resist the use of the term “deskilling” in a call centre context’. They maintained that this was because interactive service work was different to that of white collar work, eg banking. A second reason is that emotional labour and social competencies are not easily placed within the traditional mental/manual categories.
A third argument is that contact centres are not homogenized and require different levels of skills and competencies depending upon the business model that operates. In standardized high-volume contact centres a wide range of skills may not be needed but this is not the case where a higher level of customer service and interactivity is required.
Although there is a public perception that jobs in call centres are relatively easy, in reality a mixture of abilities, attitudes, characteristics and skills are needed. Research in the UK noted the failure to acknowledge the skills of contact centre advisers. In Ireland, a similar vie ‘Agent work is a complex blend of knowing, sensing and rule applying. As discussed, agents use a complex, largely unacknowledged set of personal skills.’
Identifying what a customer wants is not always an easy task and, indeed, sometimes even the customer is not always clear about his or her own expectations. One adviser said that, ‘It is like diagnosing the disease without seeing the patient’. Thus, to achieve a satisfactory resolution to the call, the adviser has to develop and apply a considerable level of knowledge and expertise eg, when handling a difficult caller or identifying a technical fault. It is skills like these that can only be developed as a result of experience and knowledge.
One reason for this failure to recognize the skills, knowledge and attitudes of advisers is that they are not always immediately obvious. Between explicit knowledge, which is systematic and formalized, and tacit knowledge ie, internalized skills, understanding, etc, which are hidden and difficult to describe and which a person may not easily articulate. Significantly, he described how explicit knowledge becomes tacit to such an extent that an individual might become unaware of using it and find it almost impossible to communicate. When agents were asked to describe how they approached specific problems they were unable to explain, stating, ‘You feel it’, ‘You know so’, ‘I just knew it’.
It would appear that employees gradually absorb conscious competence so that eventually it becomes unconscious competence. Explained:
Through experience and their participation in a ‘community of operators’ they develop a set of diagnostic skills which over time become instrumentalized, that is to say, tacit. This enables them to think quickly, ‘on their feet’, and serve customers speedily. Over time, operators learn to dwell in these skills, feel them as extensions of their own body and thus gradually become subsidiarily aware of them, which enables operators to focus on the task at hand.
If an organization can internalize skills and make them tacit and hidden these then become very difficult for competitors to copy and this provides a competitive advantage to the holder. For example, ‘The historic HR practices of the Bell system had created a highly skilled workforce with tremendous tacit knowledge of the customers, the telecommunications infrastructure, and the use of information systems’.
Given this difficulty in expressing the hidden skills of advisers it is not surprising that training manuals, etc find difficulty in comprehensively describing all the skills:
Quality service requires that workers rely on inner arsenals of affective and interpersonal skills, capabilities which cannot be successfully codified, standardized or dissected into discrete components and set forth in a company handbook.
While it may be difficult for organizations to comprehensively formalize tacit knowledge, efforts should be made. If tacit knowledge could be articulated then it would become explicit, allowing it to be communicated to others. The work done by e-skills illustrates a classic attempt to systematize and formalize the skills of those working in contact centres
No comments:
Post a Comment