Explore the vast range of titles available.

What happens over time to Indians who spend their working hours answering phone calls from Americans-and acting like Americans themselves? To find out, the authors ofAnswer the Callconducted long-term interviews with forty-five agents, trainers, managers, and CEOs at call centers in Bangalore and Mumbai from 2003 to 2012. For nine or ten hours every day, workers in call centers are not quite in India or America but rather in a state of \"virtual migration.\" Encouraged to steep themselves in American culture from afar, over time the agents come to internalize and indeed perform Americanness for Americans-and for each other. Call center agents \"migrate\" through time and through the virtual spaces generated by voice and information sharing. Drawing from their rich interviews, the authors show that the virtual migration agents undergo has no geographically distant point of arrival, yet their perception of moving is not merely abstract. Over the duration of the job, agents' sense of place and time changes: agents migrate but still remain, leaving them somewhere in between-between India and America, experience and imagination, class mobility and consumption, tradition and modernity, here and there, then and now, past and future. However tangible and elastic their virtual mobility might seem in these relatively lucrative jobs, it is also suspended within the confines of the very boundaries they migrate across. Having engaged with these vivid and often poignant interviews, readers will never again be indifferent to an Indian agent's greeting at the other end of a toll-free call: \"Hello, my name is Roxanne. How may I help you?\"

Smiling Down the Linetheorizes call centre work as info-service employment and looks at the effects of ever-changing technologies on service work, its associated skills, and the ways in which it is managed.

We describe the epidemiology of a coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in a call center in South Korea. We obtained information on demographic characteristics by using standardized epidemiologic investigation forms. We performed descriptive analyses and reported the results as frequencies and proportions for categoric variables. Of 1,143 persons who were tested for COVID-19, a total of 97 (8.5%, 95% CI 7.0%-10.3%) had confirmed cases. Of these, 94 were working in an 11th-floor call center with 216 employees, translating to an attack rate of 43.5% (95% CI 36.9%-50.4%). The household secondary attack rate among symptomatic case-patients was 16.2% (95% CI 11.6%- 22.0%). Of the 97 persons with confirmed COVID-19, only 4 (1.9%) remained asymptomatic within 14 days of quarantine, and none of their household contacts acquired secondary infections. Extensive contact tracing, testing all contacts, and early quarantine blocked further transmission and might be effective for containing rapid outbreaks in crowded work settings.

Over a million people in the UK work in call centres, and the phrase has become synonymous with low-paid and high stress work, dictatorial supervisors and an enforced dearth of union organisation. However, rarely does the public have access to the true picture of what goes on in these institutions. For Working the Phones, Jamie Woodcock worked undercover in a call centre to gather insights into the everyday experiences of call centre workers. He shows how this work has become emblematic of the shift towards a post-industrial service economy, and all the issues that this produces, such as the destruction of a unionised work force, isolation and alienation, loss of agency and, ominously, the proliferation of surveillance and control which affects mental and physical wellbeing of the workers. By applying a sophisticated, radical analysis to a thoroughly international 21st century phenomenon, Working The Phones presents a window onto the methods of resistance that are developing on our office floors, and considers whether there is any hope left for the modern worker today.

We employ a discrete choice experiment in the employment process for a national call center to estimate the willingness to pay distribution for alternative work arrangements relative to traditional office positions. Most workers are not willing to pay for scheduling flexibility, though a tail of workers with high valuations allows for sizable compensating differentials. The average worker is willing to give up 20 percent of wages to avoid a schedule set by an employer on short notice, and 8 percent for the option to work from home. We also document that many job-seekers are inattentive, and we account for this in estimation.

Transnational customer service workers are an emerging touchstone of globalization given their location at the intersecting borders of identity, class, nation, and production. Unlike outsourced manufacturing jobs, call center work requires voice-to-voice conversation with distant customers; part of the product being exchanged in these interactions is a responsive, caring, connected self. InPhone Clones, Kiran Mirchandani explores the experiences of the men and women who work in Indian call centers through one hundred interviews with workers in Bangalore, Delhi, and Pune. As capital crosses national borders, colonial histories and racial hierarchies become inextricably intertwined. As a result, call center workers in India need to imagine themselves in the eyes of their Western clients-to represent themselves both as foreign workers who do not threaten Western jobs and as being \"just like\" their customers in the West. In order to become these imagined ideal workers, they must be believable and authentic in their emulation of this ideal. In conversation with Western clients, Indian customer service agents proclaim their legitimacy, an effort Mirchandani calls \"authenticity work,\" which involves establishing familiarity in light of expectations of difference. In their daily interactions with customers, managers and trainers, Indian call center workers reflect and reenact a complex interplay of colonial histories, gender practices, class relations, and national interests.

A rising share of employees now regularly engage in working from home (WFH), but there are concerns this can lead to ‘‘shirking from home.’’ We report the results of a WFH experiment at Ctrip, a 16,000-employee, NASDAQ-listed Chinese travel agency. Call center employees who volunteered to WFH were randomly assigned either to work from home or in the office for nine months. Home working led to a 13% performance increase, of which 9% was from working more minutes per shift (fewer breaks and sick days) and 4% from more calls per minute (attributed to a quieter and more convenient working environment). Home workers also reported improved work satisfaction, and their attrition rate halved, but their promotion rate conditional on performance fell. Due to the success of the experiment, Ctrip rolled out the option to WFH to the whole firm and allowed the experimental employees to reselect between the home and office. Interestingly, over half of them switched, which led to the gains from WFH almost doubling to 22%. This highlights the benefits of learning and selection effects when adopting modern management practices like WFH.

We investigate the effect of pollution on worker productivity in the service sector by focusing on two call centers in China. Using precise measures of each worker’s daily output linked to daily measures of pollution and meteorology, we find that higher levels of air pollution decrease worker productivity. These results manifest themselves at levels of pollution commonly found in large cities throughout the developing and developed world.

In this paper, we study the contracting issues in an outsourcing supply chain consisting of a user company and a call center that does outsourcing work for the user company. We model the call center as a G/G/s queue with customer abandonment. Each call has a revenue potential, and we model the call center's service quality by the percentage of calls resolved (revenue realized). The call center makes two strategic decisions: how many agents to have and how much effort to exert to achieve service quality. We are interested in the contracts the user company can use to induce the call center to both staff and exert effort at levels that are optimal for the outsourcing supply chain (i.e., chain coordination). Two commonly used contracts are analyzed first: piecemeal and pay-per-call-resolved contracts. We show that although they can coordinate the staffing level, the resulting service quality is below system optimum. Then, depending on the observability and contractibility of the call center's effort, we propose two contracts that can coordinate both staffing and effort. These contracts suggest that managers pay close attention to service quality and its contractibility in seeking call center outsourcing.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate work engagement as a mediator of the impacts of supervisor support and self-efficacy on quitting intentions, and examine self-efficacy as a mediator between supervisor support and work engagement. Design/methodology/approach Data were collected from 177 call center employees in Malaysia. The aforesaid linkages were tested through structural equation modeling. Findings As hypothesized, self-efficacy mediates the relationship between supervisor support and work engagement, while work engagement mediates the impacts of supervisor support and self-efficacy on quitting intentions. Originality/value Though work engagement is on the decline and employee turnover is on the rise, no attention has been given to investigating the impacts of supervisor support and self-efficacy simultaneously on call center employees’ work engagement and quitting intentions so far. Therefore, the study aims to fill in this void.