Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
145,426
result(s) for
"Call centers"
Sort by:
Outsourcing and offshoring business services
Bringing together theoretical and empirical studies from the Journal of Information Technology, this book provides a definitive guide to research discovered on the growing global sourcing phenomenon. Paying particular attention to Information Technology Outsourcing (ITO) and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), theoretical chapters explore insightful ways of thinking about the different facets of outsourcing, and provide useful information to practitioners and researchers. Empirical chapters report the findings of 405 major research studies into the risks and successes of relationships between customer and vendor, the development of trust in these relationships, the factors affecting locations for offshoring, and specialized offshoring organizations such as captive centres. In this comprehensive study, the editors present an expert review of the historical development of this field, and offer analysis of emerging findings and practices for the future.
Book
Answer the Call
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?\"
eBook
Valuing Alternative Work Arrangements
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.
Journal Article
DOES WORKING FROM HOME WORK? EVIDENCE FROM A CHINESE EXPERIMENT
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.
Journal Article
The Effect of Pollution on Worker Productivity
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.
Journal Article
Disintegrating Democracy at Work
The shift from manufacturing- to service-based economies has often been accompanied by the expansion of low-wage and insecure employment. Many consider the effects of this shift inevitable. InDisintegrating Democracy at Work, Virginia Doellgast contends that high pay and good working conditions are possible even for marginal service jobs. This outcome, however, depends on strong unions and encompassing collective bargaining institutions, which are necessary to give workers a voice in the decisions that affect the design of their jobs and the distribution of productivity gains.
Doellgast's conclusions are based on a comparative study of the changes that occurred in the organization of call center jobs in the United States and Germany following the liberalization of telecommunications markets. Based on survey data and interviews with workers, managers, and union representatives, she found that German managers more often took the \"high road\" than those in the United States, investing in skills and giving employees more control over their work. Doellgast traces the difference to stronger institutional supports for workplace democracy in Germany. However, these democratic structures were increasingly precarious, as managers in both countries used outsourcing strategies to move jobs to workplaces with lower pay and weaker or no union representation. Doellgast's comparative findings show the importance of policy choices in closing off these escape routes, promoting broad access to good jobs in expanding service industries.
eBook
Smiling Down the Line
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.
eBook
Coronavirus Disease Outbreak in Call Center, South Korea
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.
Journal Article
Quality Challenges in Municipal Telecare Call Center Services: Qualitative Evaluation Using the Anchored, Realistic, Cocreated, Human, Integrated, and Evaluated (ARCHIE) Framework
Telecare is seen as a promising technology aimed at enhancing the accessibility and efficiency of health care services. Although focus on quality has been highly prioritized within the health care services, there is a need to explore the quality of telecare services in general and municipal telecare call centers (CCs) in particular, as health and assistive technologies are increasingly being implemented in patients' homes.
The study sought to explore which factors influence the quality of telecare services provided by municipal telecare CCs in Norway, evaluated through the anchored, realistic, cocreated, human, integrated, and evaluated (ARCHIE) framework.
The study had a multiple-case design. Interviews were the main source of data from 15 informants from 5 municipal telecare CCs across Norway. Observation and document studies were used for background and contextualization. To explore and evaluate quality, a combined deductive-inductive analysis was conducted.
Evaluated against the ARCHIE framework, none of the quality criteria were fully met. Due to the telecare service not being sufficiently anchored for all patients, it was challenging to provide realistic technologies. The collaborative work was difficult, with challenges in recruiting patients. The human principle was characterized by variation of knowledge and national guidelines. Municipal telecare CCs were not integrated into the health care services, and data must be used to a greater extent for evaluation and learning than is currently the case.
The findings suggest that municipal telecare CC services have several shortcomings in providing high-quality health care. Relating the quality principles identified by the ARCHIE framework to normalization process theory constructs indicates that the CC service remains in a transitional phase of normalization. To improve the telecare CC services and enhance communication and integration, policymakers need to reduce fragmentation in the broader health care system. Further national standardization to professionalize the telecare CC services should be developed. The telecare CCs need to improve their service related to all indicators of the ARCHIE framework. Training for telecare operators should be prioritized.
Journal Article