Executive summary and implications for managers and executives

Citation

(2009), "Executive summary and implications for managers and executives", Journal of Services Marketing, Vol. 23 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/jsm.2009.07523eaf.001

Executive summary and implications for managers and executives

Article Type: Executive summary and implications for managers and executives From: Journal of Services Marketing, Volume 23, Issue 5

This summary has been provided to allow managers and executives a rapid appreciation of the content of the issue. Those with a particular interest in the topic covered may then read the issue in toto to take advantage of the more comprehensive description of the research undertaken and its results to get the full benefit of the material present.

We are all familiar with television commercials showing smiling call center staff ready and waiting to answer customers’ calls. They are obviously extremely happy in their work and have the resources and knowledge to make your call to them a rewarding experience. They are going to enjoy helping you. You are bound to finish the call happy in the knowledge that your questions have been answered or, if it is a complaint, it is going to be sorted out quickly. At least that is the message the advertisement is trying to get across.

The reality is that those smart, smiling folk are probably actors. Back at the “real” call center chances are there will be fewer smiles and rather more anxiety. Rather than being happy in their work, employees might be frustrated at having to balance a somewhat lonely task of trying to help someone over the phone while having to meet strict efficiency targets and high levels of monitoring and control. And who is this intense monitoring going to help? Will it help the employees to operate more effectively or put them under even more pressure with an adverse effect on service quality? If they are in an “offshore” center – maybe in India but serving UK or US customers – they will possibly have the added stress of using a false name, pretending to be someone and somewhere else.

Stress and burnout are familiar complaints among call center staff in a work environment which has been unkindly called an “electronic sweatshop.” So how can managers do the right thing by their customers, employers and employees? How do you recruit staff who can flourish under such conditions – and how do you keep them? How can you adapt your working practices to encourage job satisfaction and the resulting customer service quality? How do you empower employees to be flexible while responding to the economic need for standardization and customization? Do managers recognize the link between a positive service climate for employees and the customers’ evaluation of service quality?

Important questions, especially as this unique industry has been spreading across the globe at an unprecedented rate. Globalization brings its own special problems with many customers preferring their calls to be answered by someone who lives in their own country and talks pretty much like they do.

Call centers are a major customer touch point that must be managed – and managed well. A majority of customer contact occurs through them and the image of the company from the customer’s eyes can either be demolished or enhanced from interactions with a call center.

There are major consequences for companies that do not focus on caller satisfaction. Dissatisfied customers are more likely to spend less, switch to competitors, and spread negative word of mouth communication.

Many people dread having to contact a call center and sometimes with good reason. One of the reasons often quoted by disgruntled customers is the amount of time they have been “on hold”, sometimes being forced to listen to music they do not particularly like and with no idea how long it is going to be before they actually get to speak to someone.

Often they will complain to friends and family (and in doing so blacken the name of the company they had been trying to get through to) that they were kept waiting for “ages”. But just how long is “ages”? It is often the case that callers have been kept waiting for far less time than they think they have. Unfortunately, the fact that it just “seems” like longer is no comfort to a provider trying to do their best for the customer. People resent having to wait, especially if their call is urgent. Even if it is not urgent, waiting is a waste of time. So it is important that providers address this as best they can by getting to know their customer base better.

Providers who think there is not much they can do about customers who merely think they have been waiting longer than they actually have been would be wrong. What is happening is that people’s time perception is due to some inner “timer” and the more they think about the waiting the longer it seems to be – hence the old saying about a watched kettle never boiling. This discrepancy between perceived and actual wait times is defined as an “estimation error” and it is interesting to note that some consumers may also underestimate waiting time. Call center managers need to know what variables are causing estimation error and what factors are causing it to increase or decrease.

Organizations that do not already focus heavily on caller satisfaction should evaluate how much and how important the business activities are that occur through their call centers. For organizations that conduct critical and/or numerous activities that way, the stakes are much higher for increasing satisfaction.

In their article “Closing the gap between perceived and actual waiting times in a call center: results from a field study”, Anita Whiting and Naveen Donthu report eight major findings from their investigation of a call center which supports franchisees with point-of-sales and back-office systems:

1. 1.

   The larger the gap between perceived and actual waiting times, the less satisfied consumers are.

2. 2.

   As actual wait increases, estimation error declines.

3. 3.

   Expectations about the wait do not impact estimation error but it does greatly impact customer satisfaction.

4. 4.

   Presence of music greatly increases estimation error among callers.

5. 5.

   However, estimation error of waiting times is significantly less for consumers who like the music that is played.

6. 6.

   Compared to men, women have significantly more estimation error and they overestimate their wait time more.

7. 7.

   Waiting information greatly reduces estimation error and overestimation among callers.

8. 8.

   Callers with more urgent issues have more estimation error and are more likely to inflate how long they have been on hold.

Although actual wait times do not seem to influence customer satisfaction but perception of the wait and most significantly estimation error of the wait does, not many organizations are currently collecting these data.

Decreasing estimation error and overestimation should be an initiative for organizations because customers’ feeling that a one minute wait actually lasted ten minutes has a direct impact on customer satisfaction. Organizations may also want to rethink the data (e.g., number of calls handled per employee) that they are collecting to see if that is really important to customers.

Just playing music while callers are put on hold is not adequate. Music should be liked. Organizations should research their customers and match the music to the customers’ preferences. For organizations with many different types of consumers, they may want to use a system that would give callers a choice of music. Organizations may also want to consider the option of silence or the news. Silence may be soothing for stressed customers. News may also be a good option for consumers who want to be informed and educated while waiting on hold instead of just wasting time listening to music they do not particularly enjoy.

Organizations should consider providing information cues such as estimated wait times. These reduce estimation error and help callers be more realistic about how long they actually waited. Providing waiting information also helps reduce uncertainty and it helps consumers decide whether or not to wait. Consumers who hear an estimated wait time of 25 minutes may immediately decide to call back later. Estimated wait times also set consumers’ expectations. With telephone holds, consumers can not see the virtual line of callers and have no way of knowing how long the wait may be.

Urgent callers should be given special attention and, if possible, not be put on hold. One way to address this is by letting callers specify why they are calling via a menu selection.

As the study found that women had more estimation error and they overestimated more than men, organizations need to know the gender of their target audience. Retailers whose customer base is mostly women need to focus heavily on perception techniques. The waiting strategies of organizations must line up with the target market that it serves.

Just as a customer’s long waiting time may merely be a belief that it was “long” and not based on reality, customers’ perceptions of another burning issue which bedevils call centers needs to be addressed – outsourcing to another country. Offshore outsourcing is one of the most controversial topics in business today and a fast-growing factor in the world economy.

Yet many businesses, including significant players in the UK and USA, which went along the outsourcing route as a means of reducing costs and increasing efficiency and profits, are revising their operations in the light of their offshoring strategy backfiring as customers report communication difficulties, long waits for the query to be handled, concerns about privacy, and a feeling that some overseas employees have not the necessary skills and expertise to solve complex computer problems and rely too much on scripted answers.

However, just as customers’ own time estimation errors can blur the distinction between what is real and what is imaginary, so too can their preconceived notions about the quality of call center service provided by people from their own country and that provided by foreigners. It is perhaps not wise to assume such customers are either xenophobic or racist, or even both. Better to be aware of both real and imaginary difficulties in order to protect the organization’s reputation, brand image, core skills and property rights.

Nevertheless, a recent UK survey found as many as 83 percent of respondents were concerned about account mishandling and about 75 percent had fears about security – even though there was no evidence that security problems at an overseas center are any more rife than their UK counterparts. The same survey also showed an overwhelming majority of customers (82 percent) would rather not speak to someone in an overseas call center. A US survey reported a whopping 78 percent of respondents held an unfavorable opinion about the offshore call center (OCC) and more than 80 percent said they would feel better if outsourcing did not take away American jobs.

Piyush Sharma, Rajiv Mathur and Abhinav Dhawan acknowledge that managing interactions between customers and service providers from two different cultural and socio-economic backgrounds – which can result in greater chances of misunderstanding – has never been an easy task. Their article “Exploring customer reactions to offshore call centers: Toward a comprehensive conceptual framework” addresses the following questions:

• •

  How do customers perceive offshore outsourcing of call centers by service providers?

• •

  What constitutes customers’ attitudes towards offshore call centers?

• •

  How does attitude towards such centers influence the relationship between service quality and customer satisfaction?

• •

  How does brand image influence the relationship of customer satisfaction with complaint and repeat purchase intentions?

Service firms should be aware that many of their customers have a generally negative attitude towards offshore call centers, which may or may not be a result of the service provided by their own OCCs. Second, they should be aware that these negative attitudes could result in greater dissatisfaction with even the reasonably good quality service they provide.

It would be useful for these firms to track changes in their customers’ attitudes toward OCC over time, probably as a part of their regular customer satisfaction surveys. This would help the firms discover if their customers perceive any difference in the quality of service provided by their local vs. offshore call centers. They should also try to benchmark the service levels of their offshore call centers with their own local call centers as well as competitors’ OCCs.

The effect of customer satisfaction on customer complaint and repeat purchase intentions was moderated by the service provider’s brand image – the more reputed or well-known a service firm is, the less likely are its customers to complain about its OCCs and more likely to continue using its services.

It is important for the service provider firms to take note of declining levels of perceived service quality and customer satisfaction with their offshore call centers. While this study shows that brand image may help in softening the impact of customer dissatisfaction for the time being, there is no guarantee that this may be maintained in future. Specifically, it is quite likely that the customers with highly negative attitudes toward offshore outsourcing in general and offshore call centers in particular may well be the first ones to complain or switch their service provider. Therefore, once again it is extremely important for major service provider firms to not simply rely on their brand name to help them ride over this issue, but take concrete steps to improve and track the performance of their OCC.

Tracking the performance of their employees is something most call centers, in common with most other employers, recognize the value of – whether or not those employees are at an OCC or a home-based center. However, it is also important to understand the nature of employees who are likely to be high performers, and who are likely to stay around, before they become employees.

It is not only customers who can get stressed out in a call center interaction. Just think of the employees who are doing it hour after hour, day after day. Not all call centers deserve the “electronic sweatshop” description, but it does take a certain type of personality to thrive in this unique occupation which is known for its high turnover, whether by defection or dismissal.

So who do you take on? Oddly enough, whereas many employers might be overjoyed to hear a job applicant talk of their creativity and openness to new experiences, that might not be what a call center manager should be looking for. What may seem even odder is that, whereas many managers might do anything they can to avoid employing someone who is prone to absenteeism, occasional absences might not be such a bad thing at a call center.

In their article “Call center employee personality factors and service performance”, Olukemi O. Sawyerr, Shanthi Srinivas and Sijun Wang discover, perhaps unsurprisingly, that emotionally stable individuals appear to function well in a cell center environment because they are able to cope with the high levels of emotional exhaustion, indicated particularly by lower intentions to leave. However, their study also reveals that these people may have a greater tendency to be absent probably as part of their effort to cope with the stressful nature of work in a call center and “to maintain internal equilibrium.”

So, while emotionally stable individuals are less likely to quit, they are on the other hand more likely to be absent on occasion. Given that turnover rates are particularly high (35-50 percent) in the industry, along with the attendant high training costs, it could be considered a palatable tradeoff to have emotionally stable individuals working in a stressful environment who are occasionally absent but who tend to stay with the company longer.

Further, given the restrictive nature of call centers with scripts and work monitoring, those people who are creative and who seek new experiences may not be the most suited for this type of work.

In terms of recruitment and selection strategies, given the nature of call center work with its emphasis on interacting with people, there may be a tendency on the part of recruiters to focus on factors associated with extraversion/introversion when interviewing candidates. However, whether or not an individual is extroverted or introverted did not seem to have any bearing on performance in call centers examined. Recruiters’ focus should be on identifying individuals who are emotionally stable rather than on those who are outgoing, friendly and strong in dealing with people.

The use of personality characteristics in selection decisions is fraught with controversy. Considering the human and organizational costs in call centers, it may be a worthwhile investment for organizations with multiple call centers to examine the validity of personality characteristics, such as emotional stability and openness to new experience, in predicting performance on the job. If certain personality types can be established as valid predictors of on-the-job performance, then they can be incorporated into the selection instruments currently employed in call centers. These may include pre-screening personality tests as well as structured interview questions that address the characteristics associated with the “big five” personality variables that have been shown to be related to job performance – extraversion/introversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, openness to new experience, and emotional stability.

Call center managers may want to consider modifying the nature of the work in a manner that retains the efficiencies of the organization while increasing opportunities for collaboration and teamwork. A previous study found that call centers that use what they referred to as the quality strategy, that is, hiring more highly-educated employees, paying higher wages, providing more opportunities for employee judgment and problem-solving, and using less monitoring to manage performance, experienced less turnover than those that did not. Work can be redesigned to give employees greater autonomy, greater opportunities for collaboration, and less performance monitoring to reduce the human costs associated with call centers in the form of absenteeism, turnover and poor performance, as well as to improve organizational outcomes.

Organizations may find it useful to engage their agents in designing the break policy for employees including the length and frequency of breaks. Additional training to deal with difficult customers so that agents feel more in control and thus less susceptible to emotional exhaustion may also prove to be productive. Various employee health programs may also be emphasized to act as buffers for the stressful nature of the work.

When considering recruits’ conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness to new experience etc. another personality trait sought by some call center managements is – well, to put it bluntly – employees’ ability to lie through their teeth. Not the sort of attribute a customer would necessarily choose for someone who is going to talk to them, for instance, about medical billing or health insurance claims.

These employees are actively instructed in the art of misleading and deceiving. While some customers might call it downright lying, the company might to prefer the term “strategic deception” when it comes to counteracting some Westerners’ hostility to having their call answered by someone in India or other offshore location. Agents are instructed not to give their real name but to give a pseudo, more Western-sounding name, and not to reveal the location of the call center.

Easier said than done, and another factor to heighten employee stress. Saying you are Angela rather than Asma is one thing, but it you have a heavily-accented Indian accent your deception is not so convincing. Hence the need for accent training, although many employees are told to say something like “I’m Indian but living in Sacremento” (or Manchester or London depending on whether the caller is from the USA or UK).

It seems that in the call center business, far from breeding contempt, familiarity between call center agent and customer is a definite advantage. In many cases, if a person is speaking a similar language and in a familiar accent, it tends to develop a sense of proximity. With the rapid expansion of call centers throughout the world, theories of relationship development, built on proximity, similarity, self-disclosure, and homophily (which refers to the degree to which people in a dyad are similar on certain attributes, such as demographic variables, attitudes, beliefs, and values) raise concerns for call centers located abroad.

After all, deception is historically counterintuitive in terms of building relationships with customers. Trust and honesty – not deceit and lies – are the qualities which lead to long-term relationships.

In their article, “The use of strategic deception in relationships”, Abhijit Patwardhan, Stephanie M. Noble and Ceri M. Nishihara illustrate types of deception to highlight the fact it is occurring frequently, consistently, and with no signs of diminishing. However, given the potential backlash of misleading customers, call center management needs to know whether deception is a favorable strategy under all conditions. If someone halfway across the globe sorts out your computer problems, where they are based might not matter one jot. In fact, if it is technical support you are after, it can be perceived a definite advantage to talk to someone in technologically capable India. But if there is likely to be mistrust – even totally unfounded – if a customer thinks you are not from “their country”, is just a little deception to put them at ease necessarily a bad thing?

The study is a first step towards finding out if and how companies might phase out deceiving their customers as part of the corporate strategy. It highlights that similarity in relationships should be more important in initial relationships than long-term, existing ones. For example, one agent mentioned that he told some customers about his ethnicity and location at a later stage in the relationship (which was against company policy) when he thought it was less likely to have an adverse effect on the success of the call. Therefore, there is a need to explore whether “length of relationship” can moderate the relations between strategic deception and outcome variables. As such, it is necessary to explore whether deceit tactics are more important in initial relationships (i.e., first time Western consumers phone a call center) versus in existing relationships, on key outcome variables. Currently, call center agents appear to use deceit tactics indiscriminately.

Given the counterintuitive nature of strategic deception by foreign call centers, more research is needed to understand what the long-term consequences of this type of policy are, how (and should) companies slowly revert back to traditional relationship development methods, and which customers are most likely to accept foreign companies if they engage in these traditional relationship development efforts.

Being trained to give a false name and to lie about your place of work is one sort of deception, but is it equally deceptive to be trained to know about the culture of the country whose customers you are serving? For instance, their festivals, what they eat, etc? Asking a US customer if they have been making cookies for the holidays might be a way of hoodwinking them into thinking you live in their country; alternatively it could be a commendable appreciation of their culture. Is telling a Westerner your name is John or Mary, rather than giving them the real name that they probably cannot pronounce or hear correctly, so wrong a deception? We are told there are three types of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics. To that list, it appears that we should now add “strategic deception.”

It is fair to assume that the majority of frontline employees do not want to mislead their customers about their identity or anything else. Wherever they work, at home or abroad, they want to help callers as best they can and to go home after their shift knowing they have been useful. They do not want the need for sales to compromise the service questions they have been asked, and they do not want to hurry a caller just because they have spent too much time on the previous call. They do not want the frustration of knowing that their working environment is not allowing them to deal effectively and efficiently with their customers’ queries.

Service managements who do not regularly listen to the views of their customer-contact employees and, where appropriate, make changes (or, at least, explain to staff why they are unable to) are being shortsighted. Few people would deny that valued customers get a better impression of a business from efficient, empowered and competent employees than the one they get from stressed-out, burned-out, frustrated, clock-watchers. Call center frontline employees accept they have to meet strict efficiency targets, and to accept high levels of monitoring and control while dealing with their callers. It is puzzling that, bearing in mind the emphasis on monitoring and control, some managements do not see problems which hinder employees’ effectiveness, and most call center studies have not sought employees’ views on the delivery of service quality, despite the importance of employee performance during service encounters.

In “Frontline employees’ views on organizational factors that affect the delivery of service quality in call centers”, Alison M. Dean and Al Rainnie asked employees what helps and what hinders them in delivering high-quality service, whether their productivity targets made it difficult and how they managed this conflict.

Important for managers was the finding that employees say their current key performance indicators (KPIs) do not reflect service, so perhaps less emphasis should be placed on absolute numbers and more on achieving a balance between all desirable outcomes, namely sales targets, productivity measures, and service quality measures. Employees said that the emphasis on KPIs causes them stress, which reduces the likelihood of them being friendly and welcoming to customers. Managers may wish to give priority to reviewing measurement systems to reduce their perceived preoccupation with KPIs, to enhance customer service and satisfaction, and to provide employees with more control over their work.

The quality assurance (QA) processes were seen positively but with considerable scope for improvement. Also, delayed feedback from QA monitoring was meaningless when they could not listen to the service encounter because they could not remember the call. Hence side-by-side monitoring or the use of audiotapes is preferable.

Systems need to be developed to provide employees with recognition and rewards for achievements, especially in dealing with difficult customers. This study’s participants said their only rewards were for sales, not service. Appropriate rosters could help employees to recover from the potential burnout arising from emotional labor, especially breaks of two consecutive days at regular intervals. Human resource managers should provide training that addresses analytical skills such as information processing and problem solving, and skills for managing customers. Training regimes would benefit from variety in techniques because employees noted that analytical and customer skills are harder to acquire than product knowledge, and are not available via online delivery.

Employees suggested that the benefits of the team structure could be enhanced by regular team meetings to discuss service delivery issues, seek employee input and feedback, and provide opportunities for collaborative problem solving. Relief time from telephone encounters is important. Managers need to acknowledge the intensity of frontline work and provide employees with structures that facilitate formal personal support. Focus group participants repeatedly emphasized their need for the flexibility to take short breaks when they feel these are essential to retain their emotional stability.

As noted above, mechanisms for improving customer feedback could be instigated, for example, structures to gather and disseminate customers’ responses to service delivery and their suggestions for service improvements. Employees noted that they find positive customer feedback very motivating but there are no processes to facilitate it. Similarly, employees expressed frustration at the lack of communication systems whereby they are unable to contribute to innovative or alternative options for service delivery.

The reality of call center work is that employees work in isolation, have to manage customer interactions constantly, and their day is driven by targets that are monitored electronically. Each of these features contributes to stress and there is some consensus that stress decreases service quality for customers. Hence, introducing systems that reduce employee stress is likely to result in a better working environment for employees and better quality outcomes for customers.

Customers’ desired outcomes depend, of course, on what they are calling the center for. For some it is their first point of contact with a company to complain about a service failure. Not to have their call dealt with sympathetically, efficiently and calmly only increases their existing dissatisfaction. With this nature of calls, organizations have the opportunity, not only of redeeming themselves, but also of improving their reputation with the caller. Correctly solving and addressing customer dissatisfaction does not only improve business performance directly, it has been shown to promote even more favorable customer attitudes towards the firm than if the customer had not experienced a service failure in the first place. It is an opportunity lost if the call center employee does not have the resourcefulness and supervisory backing to do the right thing by the caller.

Wise managements would have sought to actively recruit resourceful people and provide them with a working environment in which they actually enjoy solving people’s problems. Rather than going home stressed because of competing, often conflicting, demands of the organization, they will go home satisfied with a job well done. Such employees’ confidence will show – and the customers will notice.

In their article “Job resourcefulness, symptoms of burnout and service recovery performance: an examination of call centre frontline employees,” Nicholas J. Ashill, Michel Rod, Peter Thirkell and Janet Carruthers emphasize the importance for employers of identifying employees who can work productively under resource constraints and who have an innate problem-solving disposition. Specifically they suggest that job resourcefulness “buffers” the relationship between role stressors and the symptoms of burnout. They also argue that the job resourcefulness trait, as an intrinsic individual resource, directly influences the critical job outcome of service recovery performance. Their study confirms that burnout as a result of job stress can specifically impact on the effectiveness of frontline employees (FLEs) in service recovery, and further that FLE job resourcefulness can both ameliorate such burnout potential, and enhance the service recovery capability of FLEs directly.

Recruiting employees who are high in job resourcefulness may have beneficial effects for the organization beyond just the direct capacity of the individual to “buffer” the effects of stress and provide better service recovery outcomes. Such staff may be a very fruitful catalyst for streamlining and enhancing service recovery business processes more generally. Not only would this lead to improved service recovery, but it could also lead to overall gains in FLE productivity. If a highly resourceful FLE discovered that a particular rule or policy for example was systematically causing anxiety to a number of FLEs, then ideally the rule or policy could be examined and modified in a way that did not compromise the organization’s requirements, yet eased one point of pressure and stress for a number of staff. This has obvious benefits when contrasted against a non-resourceful FLE who simply puts up with the stressful rule or policy, contributing in time to burnout and a diminished capacity to provide effective service recovery experiences for customers.

Managers might want to work with highly-resourceful FLEs in identifying and resolving role ambiguity through clarifying responsibilities and goals, explaining clearly how performance is to be evaluated, and defining how much authority and decision-making latitude the FLE is allowed to exercise. Over time this could result in a subtle but important shift in organizational culture from being just a “call center” to a “solution center,” reinforced through a consistent approach to FLE training that emphasizes the solution rather than problem orientation.

The call center environment of highly demanding scripted interactions with customers may need to be reconsidered where role stressors are observed to be drifting too high. Allowing minimal decision latitude for FLEs and using high levels of scripting is a sound policy from the point of view of ensuring consistent service delivery (i.e., minimal variation in customer experience) – but may be less beneficial in those instances where service recovery performance needs to improve.

An improvement might allow for scripted service center responses by FLEs to cycle through two or three script iterations with correspondingly greater degrees of latitude, depending upon whether or not the problem is solved on a given iteration.

Satisfaction of “internal” customers (i.e. employees) is essential if they are to display the right attitude and stay committed, which is crucial for delivering good quality service and satisfying customers. In India, as elsewhere, employee turnover is a huge problem. In fact there was a joke going round the offices of one Mumbai center warning visitors that “If you reach the wrong floor you’ll be recruited!”

In “Insights into the Indian call centre industry: can internal marketing help tackle high employee turnover?” Pawan S. Budhwar, Arup Varma, Neeru Malhotra and Avinandan Mukherjee have several suggestions to reduce turnover, which include:

• •

  Employee harassment prevention. One of the key issues that need to be addressed by both the government and call center management is protecting frontline employees, and women in particular, from sexual and racial abuse from overseas clients.

• •

  Industry-specific training programs. There is a potential demand for over 160,000 foreign language professionals in Indian call centers by 2010, while only 40,000 qualified people are expected to be available.

• •

  Career planning. With properly developed career progression models, recruiters may be able to convince qualified candidates to consider call centers as a career option, not just a job.

• •

  Innovative recruitment. Call centers need to explore and employ new channels of hiring, such as job portals on the internet, walk-ins, and employee referrals. They should also consider hiring older (including retired), and more disabled people.

• •

  Eliminate accent training. It may be time for call centers to eliminate artificial accent training. There is a strong demand from several quarters to address this issue.

• •

  Fun in the workplace. Managers should be encouraged to offer stress-relieving interventions such as parties, casual dress days, table tennis facilities, etc.

• •

  Family involvement. Given that most employees are young, inviting their parents/family to the campus, could help create a better image of call center sector.

• •

  Employee welfare. Perhaps because most employees in the call centers are young, many of the organizations seem to have paid little attention to welfare and healthcare measures.

(A précis of the special issue “Call centre services”. Supplied by Marketing Consultants for Emerald.)