Andreas Broeckmann on Thu, 9 Jun 2005 03:17:41 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> call centre crisis |
[abuse, incompetence, or false expectations? or, as a friend of mine always used to say: you buy cheap, you buy twice. -ab] The abuse of Asian telephone centre staff by customers is symptomatic of corporate cock-up on a grand scale, says Simon Caulkin Sunday June 5, 2005 The Observer The lengths to which companies will go to avoid drawing the right conclusions in favour of the self-serving and expedient never ceases to amaze. A spectacular - and sad - example was highlighted in an article in this paper last week ('Indian call staff quit over abuse on the line'), describing how increasing numbers of employees were abandoning their jobs because of abuse, often racist, from British and US customers. According to the article, irate customers were a major stress factor contributing to rocketing turnover rates at Indian call centres, in some cases touching 60 or 70 per cent a year. Some organisations were employing psychiatrists and counsellors to help employees to cope. Their conclusion: anger and fear about offshoring were to blame. 'When you move jobs away from a country, there's going to be a lot of pent-up frustration which gets let out on Indian workers,' one analyst said. There is zero excuse or tolerance for the kind of abuse documented in the article. But to blame the anger on racism and the effects of offshoring is to ignore the glaring fact that belligerent customers are a major stress factor for UK and US call centres, too. Does that cause a dim light to go on somewhere? It should. The important thing is nothing to do with where the call centre is located; the important thing is that customers have had it up to here, everywhere, and the reasons are everywhere the same. At bottom, companies are still producing to suit themselves rather than the customer. 'We don't care about the colour of the person we're talking to,' says Professor Harry Scarbrough, director of the Economic and Social Research Council's Evolution of Business Knowledge programme. 'But we do care about being fobbed off with people working to a script. Call centres don't have the knowledge available in a local bank branch or shop. What customers get is knowledge that is pre-packed, shallow, mass-produced and inflexible. People don't like that.' continued at http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,6903,1499306,00.html (picked up at (Doors-Report, Notes on social innovation and service design (June 2005 http://lists.webtic.nl/mailman/listinfo/doors-report # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net