Designing a call centre Call centres are important for many companies for lots o

Question

Designing a call centre Call centres are important for many companies for lots of reasons. First, they are often the primary point of contact between the company and its customers, and so the call centre staff are the company as far as customers are concerned. The com- pany's reputation is in the hands of those people accessible 24 hours a day for global companies operating in many time zones and in many languages. Finally, the turnover of staff in call centres is very high, and can be over 90 per cent per year . Second, call centres have to be People who run call centres therefore have to pay attention to recruiting the best people and treating them well so that they stay with the company. There is some truth in the saying that a happy worker is a productive worker (not always, but often); and it is not a coincidence that First Direct (the online banking arm of HSBC) has year after year won awards for the quality of its customer service and also for how it treats its employees. The task You have been contacted by a company seeking to set up its own call centre, and your task in this exercise is to design a study to identify which factors are important for the company to consider in the design of its call centre. Consultants have identi- fied the following general factors as being important: density of workstations e layout of the space e ergonomics of the workstation (the chair, the desk, lighting etc.) e colour of the walls o the view - is there a view out of the windows? Discussion questions What primary questions/hypotheses would you investigate? Based on the list of factors identified by the consultants, how would you go about designing a study for the most effective call centre?

Explanation / Answer

Work performed in a call center is very stereotyped and calls for monotony. Hence each factor mentioned here has a significant role to play in designing and constructing a workplace out of which a call center will be run.

Being the contractor, the factors should be investigated in the following manner:

Density of workstations – This perspective totally depends on what is the business that the call center is supporting and what is the target audience. That would help in understanding the scope and business bandwidth and also the capital to be invested. That overall will help in deciding the work population, hence no.of workstations.

Space layout again depends on the above stated variables and might add or alter in a way if the specifications deal with extra space of break out area or food joints or smoking zone etc

The ergonomics of workstations would only be directly proportional to the estimated no.of workstations and also training rooms or on job training , to prevent dearth of chairs,desks etc.

Color of the wall in this context havea vital role to play, because this would be more of a eye soothing factor for th eons on job, who are entitled to deal with n.no. of customer dealings per day. Thus some catchy wall color or some thoughts or inspirational notes inscribed in order to motivate the employees.

A window to look onto the outside views will be very helpful in adding to stress buster and boredom breaker. Thus should be taken as an indispensable addition to the design specification

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