Call centres: High on technology—high on emotions

Christian Dormann

Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University Frankfurt, Germany

Fred R. H. Zijlstra

University of Surrey, Guildford, UK

In our current ‘‘service economy’’ delivery of services is a major task for
industry. Many organizations are now involved in delivering services of a
kind, and like to think of themselves as being ‘‘client-oriented’’, or ‘‘client-
centred’’. As part of their company policy these organizations regard
contact with their clients as a key feature of their company philosophy.
Technological developments, such as information technology, have boosted
this option. The internet offers appealing options in this respect since all
kinds of information concerning the companies’ products or services can be
provided via a website on the internet. These products and services can often
also be bought via the internet. Nevertheless, customers may want to
contact the organization and talk to a customer representative, either to
order the product or service, or to ask additional and specific questions.
Therefore organizations are looking for ways to be accessible to their
costumers, to be able to promptly answer questions customers may have, or
to provide reliable and up-to-date information. In particular when the
company sells products that are complex and entail all kind of technical
features, customers may have all sorts of questions. Therefore, organizations
see the necessity to set up a ‘‘helpdesk’’ where customers can get answers to
their queries without having to come to the shop again. And as a result of
enlargement of scale, many organizations have their customers spread
around the country, in Europe often across multiple countries, and therefore
have a large area to cover. This evidently implies a huge number of contacts,
and organizations are looking for efficient ways to organize these contacts.
The process of rationalization often results, according to Tayloristic
tradition, in the decision to specialize the delivery of services. This has

#

2003 Psychology Press Ltd

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/pp/1359432X.html

DOI: 10.1080/13594320344000219

Correspondence should be addressed to C. Dormann, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University

Frankfurt, Dept. of Psychology, Mertonstr. 17, D-60054, Frankfurt a.M., Germany.
Email: [e-mail]

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF WORK AND ORGANIZATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY,

2003, 12 (4), 305–310

resulted in the creation of specialized departments for customer contacts: the
call centre.

Call centres are organizations or departments that are specifically

dedicated to contacting clients and customers. This can either be the
helpdesk, or client service department of an organization, but companies
may also have outsourced this to a dedicated call centre, which handles all
client contacts for a variety of organizations. Different types of call centres
can be distinguished: (1) Inbound call centres mainly respond to incoming
calls and primarily deal with questions and complaints that costumers may
have. Clients’ questions are frequently straightforward and simple requiring
standard answers, but sometimes clients have complex requests for help
requiring non-standard answers. (2) Outbound call centres are mainly for
contacts that are initiated by the organization, they are primarily for
attempts to sell a product or service.

This also implies that call centres can harbour jobs of different levels of

qualification, ranging from unskilled people who are providing standard
information (sometimes even reading from prescribed scripts) to frequently
asked questions, to highly qualified personnel who deal with unique complex
problems (i.e., technology helpdesks). This means that the popular claim
that call centres are the nowadays Tayloristic ‘‘sweat shops’’ is an unjustified
generalization and oversimplification of the issue. Call centres indeed are the
result of a modern rationalization process, but that does not mean that all
people working in call centres have little variety and no control over their
work (although it certainly is true for particular groups). Moreover, call
centre employees have to have a deep understanding of their ‘‘matter’’. As
will become clear from this special issue, a particular requirement for
customer service representatives in call centres is that they need to have an
emotional understanding of clients’ needs requiring a considerable level of
empathy.

Call centres are a relatively new type of organization; they are a typical

product of the service economy, and closely related to technological
developments. There are numerous estimates of the growth rate of the
number of call centres. Although these estimates vary considerably, they are
unanimously high. It is clear, though, that the introduction of call centres
represents a global development and they have the interest of researchers
from all around the world; this special issue demonstrates this with
contributions from Europe, Australia, and Asia.

Two major reasons are frequently given for the rapid increase in number

of call centres. First of all, technological developments had a great impact. It
has been noted before that technology has led to a disentanglement of
‘‘time’’ and ‘‘place’’ (cf. Roe, van den Berg, Zijlstra, Schalk, Taillieu, & van
der Wielen, 1994). With the help of technology, activities are no longer
confined to a particular place or a particular time. This applies both to

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individuals (tele- or home working) and organizations. Call centres are clear
illustrations of this phenomenon. Companies can concentrate their customer
information desk in a particular country, and automatically route calls from
a number of countries to this centre, without the customer having to know
that he or she is actually calling long distance or internationally. This offers
companies an opportunity to move some of their labour intensive operations
to low wage countries. The contribution by Shah and Bandi in this issue
illustrates that high skilled service employees (as in the IT sector) can be
hired anywhere in the world.

Secondly, call centres are believed to be a cost effective way of achieving

increased service orientation and customer satisfaction. Major facets of
service quality focus on reliability (e.g., fixing a problem as soon as it
occurs), responsiveness (e.g., to be accessible), assurance (e.g., creating the
belief that the service involves high quality equipment), tangibles (e.g.,
appearance of communication materials), and empathy (e.g., the individua-
lized attention that an organization provides to its customers; Parasuraman,
Berry, & Zeithaml, 1991; cf. Dormann & Kaiser, 2002). In many ways, call
centres are obviously likely to confirm such requirements. Thus, not only
anticipated cost reduction but also increases in profits via customer
satisfaction have triggered the development of call centres.

Call centres, to some extent, are also a reflection of the current Zeitgeist
phenomenon; they are thought of being: clean, fast, precise, nice-to-have,
and ‘‘always there’’ for us. However, behind the scenes, researchers and
practitioners have detected fault lines in the smooth surface. Undoubtedly
there have been economic advantages associated with the introduction of
call centres; however, downsizing and closing of call centres have become a
new reality. Similarly, the promised benefits for customers have frequently
not shown up as they were expected. Many of us are more likely to
remember discomfort, frustration, and anger rather than joy and pleasure
when thinking about past experiences with call centres. Actually, although
cost reduction and customer care are both cited as common reasons for the
introduction of call centres, they are partially incompatible with each other.

At least in parts, some of the current problems associated with call

centres are founded on the ongoing neglect of organizations as socio-
technical systems. In case of call centres, the development of the technical
systems has typically dominated the development of the social system, with
sometimes detrimental effects on call centre employees. The present issue of
the European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology presents
evidence that working in call centres does put specific demands upon
employees, which makes working in a call centre different from other jobs.
The technological and contextual circumstances have a great impact on call
centre jobs. However, the traditional sociotechnical systems approach is not

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sufficient to describe all the problems. In fact, call centres, like most service
organizations, should be better viewed as socio-sociotechnical systems.
Focus on social systems is too frequently limited to selection and training of
employees

and their attitudes, values, and behaviours; the social customer

system, including their wishes, desires, aims, and behaviours, and its impact
on the employee system are frequently overlooked. Similarly, a focus on
technical systems, such as monitoring the input – output flow or making
technology flexible with the product mix, often ignores the customer system,
too. For instance, although consideration of the potential negative impact of
performance monitoring practices on employees represents a sound socio-
technical perspective, it should also be taken into account that monitoring
practices may impact on the customer system, too. Customers are usually
informed that their calls are monitored, and they may feel observed and
controlled, which may lead to a wide range of negative consequences such as
dissatisfaction or verbal aggression. Thus an integrated strategy of
organizational development should simultaneously consider employees
(e.g., human resources departments), technology (e.g., IT departments),
and customers (e.g., marketing departments). Obviously, this is not a trivial
task because services are dynamic and cannot be readily planned, created,
stored, and sold on demand.

One way to fit the social employee system to the social customer systems

is emotional labour or emotion work. Employees are paid by organizations
to display (usually positive) emotions towards customers irrespective of their
current feelings. Call centre employees should make customers feel as if they
are really interested in the customers’ problems, and be friendly as if they are
happy to talk to them. Empirical evidence for the beneficial effects of
emotion work on customers does not yet exist, but its detrimental effects on
call centre agents’ health is clearly demonstrated by Lewig and Dollard (this
issue) and Grebner, Semmer, Faso, Gut, Ka¨lin, and Elfering (this issue).
Since employee ill-health is negatively related to customer satisfaction
(Leiter, Harvie, & Frizell, 1998) one can doubt whether emotion work is
worth its effort in terms of revenues due to customer satisfaction or the like.

Various studies have shown that turnover rates are particularly high in

call centres (e.g., Michel, 2001), illustrating that working in call centres is
not always as nice as people would think. Moreover, it undermines the
strategic goal of cost reduction because expenditures for training new
employees increase. It is not the workload, pressure, and stress that make
call centre jobs problematic. Rather, results (Bakker, Demerouti, &
Schaufeli, this issue; Grebner et al., this issue) point in the direction that,
in order to overcome problems with turnover, call centre jobs should be
enriched with complexity, control, and variety. At a first glance, this seems
to be incompatible with the establishment of low and semiskilled jobs, but
most contributors to this Special Issue offer some useful practical guidance.

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Most articles compiled in this Special Issue were concerned with the

working conditions at call centres. Zapf, Isic, Bechtoldt, and Blau report
results of a comparison of a variety of variables between call centres and
different kinds of jobs (service jobs, nonservice jobs). One important
question is whether these differences lead to consequences such as impaired
health or decreased performance. Bakker et al. argue that different kinds of
working conditions have different kinds of effects; whilst job demands affect
absenteeism via health problems, job resources affect turnover via
involvement. They found good support for their model, which is useful
because most authors acknowledge the particular relevance of absenteeism
and turnover in call centres. A more differentiated picture with regard to
health-related outcomes is provided by Grebner et al. They show how a
great variety of resources and stressors including aspects of emotion work,
which Zapf et al. identified as particularly high in call centre jobs, are related
to health outcomes in call centres. Lewig and Dollard found similar results
in Australian call centres, showing that the effects are similar across
countries and cultures. Their findings stress that the imbalance between
rewards on the one hand and emotional demands on the other causes health
problems in call centre agents. Finally, Shah and Bandi present a case study,
in which the demand for personnel development in high-knowledge
customer-contact-centres is vividly described. Their study explicitly shows
that there is no technological determinism since the work of the agents in
their study is relatively enriched. Although this may be an extreme case, it
reflects the conclusions of many authors that call centres are not a bad place
to work per se—it depends.

Since, from an employer’s perspective, call centres represent an efficient

means to improve organizations’ economic performance, the relative
number of job in call centres (or customer-contact centres) will continue
to rise for years. However, almost all authors acknowledge that much has to
be done until such jobs become attractive and motivating, with no or little
effects on ill-health, with development opportunities, and with good
performance from the viewpoint of the customer.

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Grebner, S., Semmer, N. K., Faso, L. L., Gut, S., Ka¨lin, W., & Elfering, A. (2003). Working

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, 12(4), 341 – 365.

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