Model facilities? That's what we all want and deserve now
By silicon.com
Published: 6 November 2003 16:50 GMT
06.11.98: Virgin Rail Group is bringing 1,000 new call centre jobs to Scotland. The rail operator is to create 300 jobs within the next 12 months in its Edinburgh and Dingwall centres, with the rest coming over the next five years. Cap Gemini will provide the technology as well as setting up a website to deal with bookings.
Derek Anderton, internet manager at the Edinburgh call centre, said: "We use the Tribute system - a legacy mainframe inherited from British Rail."
Efficiency in the existing centres has been dramatically improved by training agents in customer service and sales techniques, and by using touch-tone menus.
06.11.03 Leaving aside for now the question of just how much Virgin has improved rail services, it is immediately apparent that five years ago there were almost as many call centres sprouting up as wide-eyed dot-coms. (We should know.)
However, it was also around this time that the image of these facilities as the modern era's dark satanic mills also took hold. Some call centres have indeed been terrible workplaces, with strict targets and limits on just about everything - including toilet breaks in some cases.
However, the often untold story is about those that are strategic to organisations and are actually a good place to work.
When the first call centre offshoring stories started to emerge there was knee-jerk hostility in many media, even when it was a case of outsourcing the least appealing jobs. As with many sectors, we now know we should be concerned with keeping good-quality, rewarding jobs that actually do a business and its customers a lot of good.
We'll be bringing you more on model call centres tomorrow.
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