Call centres
IP telephony has been gaining ground in Call Centres for some time. The trend towards offshoring, virtual call centres (where calls are routed between multiple locations) and home working has accelerated this trend. Much traffic going offshore is converted to IP to enable more efficient use of international trunk capacity and the ability to integrate telephony into other applications makes it a good fit for this type of usage. Datamonitor believes that IP telephony will become mainstream in the Call Centre market over the next four to five years although much of this growth will come in ”Greenfield” deployments. However, even allowing for legacy upgrades, they predict that IP shipments will reach parity with TDM by 2008. A key development in this deployment is the migration to virtual and smaller call centres, especially where there is a premium on individual service and higher levels of sophistication. This is especially true in the knowledge economy sector which itself accounts for 8.4 m workers or 30% of the total working population. The overall market for call centres is estimated by the DTI to reach 1m agents in the UK by 2007,
The traditional way of delivering call centres is to build a structure dedicated to this function and specifically designed for this type of working (heavy telecoms and IT infrastructure and open “cube” layout floor plans). Staff are recruited on a permanent basis, often from the unskilled unemployed, and trained in house. This makes the model attractive for areas of significant unemployment, especially where traditional industries have failed and where grants are available for new ventures. As workers become bored with the repetitive and stressful nature of the work and acquire enough skills to be attractive to another call centre operator they move jobs creating a significant staff turnover problem. As we reach effective full employment staff become harder and harder to recruit further stressing the model and driving more outsourcing of call centre operations. Quite a high percentage of this work is now outsourced to specialist operators who can use best practice to bring down costs. The problem is that demand is uneven during the working day and due to the permanent employment pattern of many centres resources are under-utilised driving a high implied cost. This in turn causes many operators, both in house and outsourced, to look at sending work overseas to where the employment costs are lower. The problem with this approach is that it addresses only one part of the equation, cost of delivery staff. In fact, facility and technology costs remain much the same and management overheads may actually rise.
The most effective way of trunking telephony traffic out to an offshore call centre is using Voice over IP. With this leg of the IP infrastructure already in place, resistance to Voice over IP at the edge is reduced.
In the US, where the backlash against offshoring is strongest, operators are increasingly looking at Voice over IP as a way of routing traffic intelligently to self-employed homeworkers. There are a number of advantages to this model:
- Staff are more highly motivated as they control what and who they work for.
- Staff are only paid when they work helping peak hour coverage and preventing expensive low activity periods
- No need for expensive specialist buildings
- Network based recruitment and management keeps overheads low
- Work can be directed into rural areas which is attractive to government
- Reduced commuting lowers stress and emission based pollution
- Work is available for people who are house bound due to disability, age or caring responsibilities
Whilst training costs can be higher with this model early indications are that it can deliver higher quality than traditional models at a cost equivalent to or lower than offshoring. It also is attractive from a societal and governmental perspective and reduces balance of payment pressure on the economy.
The applications to support the home or remote worker are examined in more detail in the following section and this issue will be revisited in some detail in the paper “Teleworking and Virtual Call Centres”.
Flexible working
As the pace of work increases (and with it stress), employees are asserting their desire for a better work/life balance through improved flexibility. This has a number of manifestations, all of which are simplified or enabled through a combination of VoIP and Wireless technology,
Mobility. Work is becoming less and less office based. The impact of globalisation and reduced timescales drives a greater need for speed of response. This results in an “always on, always available” mindset where there are very few circumstances in which we are not available. Mobile phones have either poorly or expensively addressed the issues of data connectivity. Wireless technology addresses the cost and quality of the data connection and as a result provides an alternative conduit for voice communications.
Home working. As most Western societies reach full employment, many people who would not normally be part of the workforce, for reasons of age, disability, childcare etc. are being lured back into work by the opportunity to work from home. By contrast the “always on, always available” culture drives a need to work from home at evenings and weekends even for the full time employed,
Relationship Capital and Social Networks
Although these topics will be covered in more detail in a later paper it is worth considering them briefly here. If work becomes less office-centric, how certain social benefits that office work delivers are to be replaced needs to be considered.
How people work together in these new flexible structures is dependent in large part upon how well they communicate and collaborate. If some of the face to face communication opportunities that occur casually in the working day are no longer available, thought needs to be given to other ways that these can be delivered. The alternative may be more and more formal meetings and a likely drop in productivity. Formal communications can be managed remotely through email and telephone calls but these do not always deliver the flexibility that the casual encounter provides,
The growth of online social networks to replace these face to face interactions has been one of the most remarkable phenomena of the last few years. Broadband has in part enabled this with people dipping in and out of these networks almost as “breaks” in the working day. Although this has been most marked in the micro and self employed sector these tools are perfectly valid for anyone who works on their own.
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