Call Centres

Global study finds regulated in-house call centres are better

A major global study on call centres involving 17 countries and coordinated by Cornell University in the United States challenges perceptions of call centre management and employment. Evidence from the study reveals cost-focussed call centres create low quality jobs, customer dissatisfaction and employee turnover.

The study is the first large scale international study of call centre management and employment practices across all regions of the globe, including Asia, Africa, South America, North America and Europe. The study covered around 2,500 centres, employing 475,000 employees in 17 countries and provides a detailed account of the similarities and differences across diverse national contexts and cultures.

Some key findings from the report were:

• The large majority (86%) of call centres in all countries serve their own domestic markets and consumers.
• Two thirds of call centres are in-house serving an employer's own customers.
• A majority (75%) of employees are female and work in call centres with less than 230 employees in flat organisations.
• There is no common global face to call centres, since they tend to take on the character of their respective countries and regions based on that country's or region's laws, customs, and norms.
• Most call centres are relatively new and have emerged in countries across the globe at about the same time, within the last five to 10 years.
• While union coverage is quite low in the US, over 50% of centres in the international study have some form of collective representation.
• "Social Market" ("coordinated") economies with strong labour market regulations (eg. France, Germany Israel and Sweden) tend to have better quality jobs, lower turnover and lower wage dispersion than call centres in "liberal market" economies(eg. Canada, UK and USA) and "recently industrialised" economies (eg. Brazil, India, Poland and South Korea) where labour market regulations and unions are weaker.

Most importantly the study provides ample evidence to show that heavy reliance on a cost-focused model not only creates low quality jobs but also breeds customer dissatisfaction and employee turnover.

What about Australian call centres?

Despite the active support of Australian members of the "Global Call Centre Research Network" at UNSW; Australian employers did not participate. The ASU supports such studies including Australian call centres in future.

You can download the Executive Summary and the Full Report below.

To read more about the study, go to http://www.globalcallcenter.org

Related Documents: