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This study examined the relationship between cognitive ability (IQ) and emotional intelligence (EQ) in predicting a range of different performance metrics from a call centre environment. In all, 303 call centre staff completed multi-dimensional measures of both EQ and IQ. We also had recorded nine performance data measures for each individual over a 12-month period. There were a few significant correlations with IQ (4/35) and a few more with EQ (4/28), though all EQ measures were related to “Errors Made over the year”. The performance metric that had most correlates was Average Handling Time (AHT) relating to speed of working. The number of errors an employee made was significantly positively correlated with all four EQ factors. Correlational and Structural Equation Model (SEM) analysis highlighted the importance of analysing performance metrics as distinct variables, finding contradictory evidence in the sense that some individual difference factors correlated positively with some and negatively with other outcome measures. The results are discussed in relation to the theoretical implications for researchers interested in analysing call centre performance, and also practical implications for organisations with call centres.

Every contact centre engages in some form of Call Quality Monitoring in order to improve agent performance and customer satisfaction. Call centres have traditionally used a manual process to sort, select, and analyse a representative sample of interactions for evaluation purposes. Unfortunately, such a process is marked by subjectivity, which in turn results in a distorted picture of agent performance. To address the challenge of identifying and removing subjectivity, empirical research is required. In this paper, we introduce an evidence-based, machine learning-driven framework for the automatic detection of subjective calls. We analyse a corpus of seven hours of recorded calls from a real-estate call centre using Deep Neural Network (DNN) for a multi-classification problem. The study establishes the first baseline for subjectivity detection, with an accuracy of 75%, which is comparable to relevant speech studies in emotional recognition and performance classification. We conclude, among other things, that in order to achieve the best performance evaluation, subjective calls should be removed from the evaluation process or subjective scores deducted from the overall results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Mental health conditions are a significant public health problem globally, responsible for >8 million deaths per year. In addition, they lead to lost productivity, exacerbate physical illness, and are associated with stigma and human rights violations. Uganda, like many low- and middle-income countries, faces a massive treatment gap for mental health conditions, and numerous sociocultural challenges exacerbate the burden of mental health conditions. Objective: This study aims to describe the development and formative evaluation of a digital health intervention for improving access to mental health care in Uganda. Methods: This qualitative study used user-centered design and design science research principles. Stakeholders, including patients, caregivers, mental health care providers, and implementation experts (N=65), participated in focus group discussions in which we explored participants' experience of mental illness and mental health care, experience with digital interventions, and opinions about a proposed digital mental health service. Data were analyzed using the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research to derive requirements for the digital solution, which was iteratively cocreated with users and piloted. Results: Several challenges were identified, including a severe shortage of mental health facilities, unmet mental health information needs, heavy burden of caregiving, financial challenges, stigma, and negative beliefs related to mental health. Participants' enthusiasm about digital solutions as a feasible, acceptable, and convenient method for accessing mental health services was also revealed, along with recommendations to make the service user-friendly, affordable, and available 24×7 and to ensure anonymity. A hospital call center service was developed to provide mental health information and advice in 2 languages through interactive voice response and live calls with health care professionals and peer support workers (recovering patients). In the 4 months after launch, 456 calls, from 236 unique numbers, were made to the system, of which 99 (21.7%) calls went to voicemails (out-of-office hours). Of the remaining 357 calls, 80 (22.4%) calls stopped at the interactive voice response, 231 (64.7%) calls were answered by call agents, and 22 (6.2%) calls were not answered. User feedback was positive, with callers appreciating the inclusion of peer support workers who share their recovery journeys. However, some participant recommendations (eg, adding video call options) or individualized needs (eg, prescriptions) could not be accommodated due to resource limitations or technical feasibility. Conclusions: This study demonstrates a systematic and theory-driven approach to developing contextually appropriate digital solutions for improving mental health care in Uganda and similar contexts. The positive reception of the implemented service underscores its potential impact. Future research should address the identified limitations and evaluate clinical outcomes of long-term adoption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Entrepreneurship & Development / Girisimcilik ve Kalkinma Dergisi is the property of Journal of Entrepreneurship & Development / Girisimcilik ve Kalkinma Dergisi and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Focusing on Filipino nurses, who are situated in a culture of migration where nursing is seen to pave way for overseas migration, this article explores the (non)migration decision‐making process and the temporal and agentic dimensions of the decision to stay. While regimes of mobility may restrict or enable cross‐border movements through immigration regulations, this article focuses on ongoing processes within the Philippines such as labour market development, family relations and individual considerations. The analysis shows how important events, as well as anticipated events, in aspiring migrants' life cycles impact on their decisions and aspirations. Changes in the local labour market, such as the proliferation of call centres, have provided new opportunities for socioeconomic mobility within the Philippines. This article demonstrates how nonmigration of skilled workers is a complex and multilayered phenomenon. While staying has long been seen as a passive and natural situation, this article, in line with an emerging literature, acknowledges that staying requires agency. Further, nonmigration has an inherent temporal dimension as migration aspirations may change over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction Antidepressant use has increased over the last two decades, with Australia and New Zealand among the highest antidepressant users in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. Comorbidity and polypharmacy are common in antidepressant users, increasing the likelihood of interaction-related adverse drug events, which are frequently preventable. Aim We aimed to identify, profile, and analyse potential antidepressant drug–drug interactions in information-seeking antidepressant users. Methods We retrospectively analysed antidepressant-related drug–drug interaction enquiries from patients or carers who contacted a pharmacist-led Australian national medicines call centre over an 8-year period to determine patient characteristics, concomitant drugs involved, prevalence and type of antidepressant-related drug–drug interaction across life stages, and associated risks. Results Of 3899 antidepressant drug–drug interaction calls, the most frequent concomitant drugs were antipsychotics, opioids, benzodiazepines, and complementary medicines. Narrative analyses of 2011 calls identified 81.0% of patients with potential drug–drug interactions and 10.4% categorised with worrying symptoms. The most frequent drug–drug interaction risks were excessive sedation, increased anticholinergic effects, serotonin syndrome, and suicidal thoughts. Carers of children aged

Nowadays, one of the important aspects of research on call/contact centre (CC) systems is how to automate their operations. Process automation is influenced by the continuous development in the implementation of virtual assistants. The effectiveness of virtual assistants depends on numerous factors. One of the most important is correctly recognizing the intent of clients conversing with the machine. Recognizing intentions is not an easy process, as often the client's actual intentions can only be correctly identified after considering the client's emotional state. When it comes to human–machine communication, the ability of a virtual assistant to recognize the client's emotional state would greatly improve its effectiveness. This paper proposes a new method for recognizing interlocutors' emotions dedicated directly to contact centre systems. The developed method provides opportunities to determine emotional states in text and voice channels. It provides opportunities to explore both the client's and the agent's emotional states. Information about agents' emotions can be used to build their behavioural profiles, which is also applicable in contact centres. In addition, the paper explored the possibility of emotion assessment based on automatic transcriptions of recordings, which also positively affected emotion recognition performance in the voice channel. The research used actual conversations that took place during the operation of a large, commercial contact centre. The proposed solution makes it possible to recognize the emotions of customers contacting the hotline and agents handling these calls. Using this information in practical applications can increase the efficiency of agents' work, efficiency of bots used in CC and increase customer satisfaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes workplace dynamics in a call centre located in Romania, a subsidiary of a multi-national corporation (MNC). Positing a centralised practice transfer and global management strategy, the company relies exclusively on home-country decision makers. Placed within Romania’s dependent economic profile alongside its deregulated employment relations, centralised managerial decisions create widespread organisational uncertainty with numerous hire and fire and downsizing procedures, followed by subsequent recruitment campaigns designed to replace the previously displaced workforce.

2.3 Call In: a call centre in the era of informational economy Call In was one of the call centres to put up shop in Biel. While we will turn to the political economic transformations that led to the instalment of this particular call centre in this particular city in more detail below, in this case, the call centre (pseudonymised as "Call In") is located in an office building on a peripheral street in a rather run-down area of downtown Biel/Bienne (henceforth: Biel). Keywords: affective-discursive practices; authenticity; call centre; dialect; Switzerland EN affective-discursive practices authenticity call centre dialect Switzerland 93 116 24 07/18/22 20220701 NES 220701 1 Introduction Imagine a spacious and brightly lit room, buzzing with activity. 2.1 The call centre-project The call centre described in the introduction is the site of the sociolinguistic ethnographic research project "When language becomes the subject of work: Multilingualism in Biel/Bienne's call centres", led by Alexandre Duchêne at the Institute of Multilingualism in Fribourg, Switzerland (2010-2011) and financed by the I Forum du Bilinguisme i in Biel. [Extracted from the article]

Nowadays, one of the key areas of research on contact centre systems is their automation. The main element that influences the possibility of automation of contact centre processes is the call transcription methods implemented by automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. Such systems enable developing intention recognition methods and, consequently voice bots. The current solutions used in ASR systems for many less popular languages do not guarantee a fully satisfactory transcription quality for hotline voice calls. This is due to the unique characteristics of the sound signal generated there, whose quality parameters differ significantly from those of studio recordings. The paper presents a comparative study of selected speech recognition systems that were additionally supplemented with elements of preprocessing of sound recordings and postprocessing of originally produced transcriptions. As for preprocessing, the following methods were tested: separation of the client and agent channels into two independent signals, training of ASR systems, and audio signal correction. With regards to postprocessing, on the other hand, tests were performed for inarticulate sounds, normalization of standard phrases (e.g. numbers, dates, times, etc.), and identification of close-sounding phrases and foreign language phrases, and lemmatization. Based on the research conducted and the analyses performed, a new method of call transcription intended specifically for contact center systems was proposed. The research conducted for this paper was based on the Polish language model, for which major problems are observed with the quality of automatic contact center call transcriptions.

Introduction. Antidepressant use has increased over the last two decades, with Australia and New Zealand among the highest antidepressant users in Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. Comorbidity and polypharmacy are common in antidepressant users, increasing the likelihood of interaction-related adverse drug events, which are frequently preventable. Aim. We aimed to identify, profile, and analyse potential antidepressant drug-drug interactions in information-seeking antidepressant users. Methods. We retrospectively analysed antidepressant-related drug-drug interaction enquiries from patients or carers who contacted a pharmacist-led Australian national medicines call centre over an 8-year period to determine patient characteristics, concomitant drugs involved, prevalence and type of antidepressant-related drug-drug interaction across life stages, and associated risks. Results. Of 3899 antidepressant drug-drug interaction calls, the most frequent concomitant drugs were antipsychotics, opioids, benzodiazepines, and complementary medicines. Narrative analyses of 2011 calls identified 81.0% of patients with potential drug-drug interactions and 10.4% categorised with worrying symptoms. The most frequent drug-drug interaction risks were excessive sedation, increased anticholinergic effects, serotonin syndrome, and suicidal thoughts. Carers of children aged <15 years and older adults (65-74 years) were more likely to report experiencing worrying symptoms. Although more potential pharmacodynamic than pharmacokinetic interactions were recorded, pharmacokinetic interactions tended to have more significant clinical impact. Discussion. Antidepressant users often have information gaps and safety concerns regarding drug-drug interactions that motivate help-seeking behaviour. Symptoms and drug-drug interaction consequences may be underestimated in these patients. Primary care health professionals have a role in proactively addressing the risk of drug-drug interactions to support benefit-risk assessment and shared decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to neighbouring Italy’s accelerating outbreak of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), Slovenia established a national toll-free telephone helpline, which operated from 9 March until 12 June 2020 and answered more than 40 thousand calls in its first ten weeks alone. It was operated by medical students and integrated professionals from diverse fields in order to provide trustworthy, accurate, and understandable information to the citizens of Slovenia. We examine the impact that this centralised helpline had on managing the COVID-19 health crisis by shaping and monitoring the public’s response.

The past two decades have seen a growing interest in research on call centre discourse from sociolinguistic and pragmatic perspectives. Turn-by-turn micro-analyses of call centre interactions have looked at the complex power relations and face-considerations in dealing with customers' and agents' impolite behaviour. Although silence is ubiquitous in dyadic conversations, surprisingly few studies of call centre interactions have investigated silence between adjacency pairs and the potential trouble it may indicate. To fill this gap, this paper explores silence in service calls. Specifically, it first looks at routine calls for information and the most common ways in which silence is accounted for by the agents. It then examines non-routine calls where silence becomes interactionally meaningful following the agents' withheld responses at a transition-relevance place. Thus, silence becomes marked behaviour by virtue of being oriented to as unexpected by the customer and thus open to evaluations of impoliteness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Aim To describe telenurses’ experiences of difficult calls. Design A qualitative approach with a descriptive design was used to gain a deeper understanding of the telenurses’ experiences. Methods The data were collected in spring 2017 through semi‐structured interviews with 19 telenurses at call centres and primary healthcare centres and were analysed with qualitative content analysis. Results Becoming emotionally concerned is central to the telenurse’s experiences of difficult calls. Difficult calls are accompanied by feelings such as inadequacy, uncertainty and anxiety, which can be described as emotional tension. Emotional tension refers to situations when the caller’s expressed emotions were conveyed to the telenurses and altered their state of mind. The telenurses stated that difficult calls that cause them to become anxious remain in their thoughts and go through their minds repeatedly, making a deep impression.

Nowadays, one of the important aspects of research on call/contact centre (CC) systems is how to automate their operations. Process automation is influenced by the continuous development in the implementation of virtual assistants. The effectiveness of virtual assistants depends on numerous factors. One of the most important is correctly recognizing the intent of clients conversing with the machine. Recognizing intentions is not an easy process, as often the client’s actual intentions can only be correctly identified after considering the client’s emotional state. When it comes to human–machine communication, the ability of a virtual assistant to recognize the client’s emotional state would greatly improve its effectiveness. This paper proposes a new method for recognizing interlocutors’ emotions dedicated directly to contact centre systems. The developed method provides opportunities to determine emotional states in text and voice channels. It provides opportunities to explore both the client’s and the agent’s emotional states. Information about agents’ emotions can be used to build their behavioural profiles, which is also applicable in contact centres. In addition, the paper explored the possibility of emotion assessment based on automatic transcriptions of recordings, which also positively affected emotion recognition performance in the voice channel. The research used actual conversations that took place during the operation of a large, commercial contact centre. The proposed solution makes it possible to recognize the emotions of customers contacting the hotline and agents handling these calls. Using this information in practical applications can increase the efficiency of agents’ work, efficiency of bots used in CC and increase customer satisfaction.

Abstract Background Neonatal mortality is a major health burden in Bungoma County with the rate estimated at 31 per 1000 live births and is above the national average of 22 per 1000. Nonetheless, out of the nine sub county hospitals, only two are fairly equipped with necessary infrastructure and skilled personnel to manage neonatal complications such as prematurity, neonatal sepsis, neonatal jaundice, birth asphyxia and respiratory distress syndrome. Additionally, with more than 50% of neonates delivered without skilled attendance, in below par hygiene environments such as home and on the roadsides, with non-existent community based referral system, the situation is made worse. The study aims to evaluate the progress made by an intervention “Collaborative Newborn Support Project” geared towards reducing neonatal mortality rate by 30% between October 2015 and December 2018 in Bungoma County, Kenya. Methods/Design This intervention will take a quasi-experimental design approach with experimental and control sites. The project will involve pre- and post-intervention data collection with comparison group to assess intervention effects. The primary outcome will be the percentage reduction of neonatal mortality in Bungoma County. Secondary outcomes include; a) Percentage of mothers or care givers able to identify at least three danger signs in neonates in the project area, b) Proportion of neonates with complications referred to specialized neonatal centers, through the call center, c) Percentage of health providers in neonatal care units who adhere to expected neonatal standards of care (rapid and complete application of standard protocols), d) Percentage increase in neonates with severe complications in the specialized neonatal units and e) Percentage of neonates who stay in neonatal care units beyond 5 days. Discussion We outline implementation details of the ongoing ‘Collaborative Newborn Support Project’ in Bungoma County, Kenya. This includes strategies in the operations of the telehealth platform, call centre service, community engagement and measuring of the outputs and outcomes. The funding and ethical approvals have been obtained and the study commenced. Trial registration PACTR201712002802638 Retrospectively registered on 5th December 2017 at Pan African Clinical Trials Registry.

Ensuring newly arrived migrants gain fluency in the language of their host country has challenged governments worldwide. Whilst many governments provide settlement and language programs for migrants, a critical site for language development and cultural integration is the workplace itself. However very few studies have explored how different worksites and job types in the new globalised economy may facilitate migrants' acquisition of the language of a target community with which they need to communicate. Drawing on a long-term ethnographic study and sets of interviews, this research explores how a multilingual call centre based in London facilitates such language acquisition. This site uses English as well as a number of other European languages to market mostly IT products into Europe and beyond and we discuss how the training and provision of scripts contributes to agents being able to develop their language skills. This study revealed a number of facilitators for language acquisition including the spatial layout of the worksite where communication, both socially and professionally, takes place; but perhaps most surprisingly, we learned that the way in which the agents use scripts to scaffold their exchanges on phones plays a significant role in language acquisition. • Long-term ethnographic study of a UK call centre. • Many of its agents are newly arrived migrants. • The call centre provides language learning opportunities. • Language learning opportunities arise in coaching and training. • Calling scripts scaffold agent/customer exchanges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To detect the number of agents needed to serve customers, it is necessary to consider the call centre as a mass service system. Then it is possible to asses the convenient number of agents according to the probability of the system receiving a request and the time in which the request is serviced by employing a Markov chain and the Erlang model. In an archetypal call centre, the incoming calls are added to a waiting queue and subsequently they are assisted by an agent. In case all agents are occupied, the customer has to wait in the queue until one of the agents becomes available. It is, therefore, important to compromise on the number of agents and the time the customers spend waiting in the queue. The result should be that there are enough agents in the call centre to serve the customers in the time required. This article focuses on solving this problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to question diversions of and negotiations around ICT-mediated surveillance, as well as their eventual critical scope. Our analysis relies on ethnographic data collected during two field studies – one dealing with surveillance of call centre employees, the other one with prisoners’ electronic tags. We examine the ways in which those under surveillance play with the normative gaps of these devices to demystify surveillance equipment, or even manipulate it to distort data collection. These sociotechnical surveillance systems do not completely reduce uncertainty. This uncertainty is mobilized by those supervised to bypass the system or produce conformity. Practices such as these seem to have a limited critical scope because they deal with the concrete conditions of surveillance rather than with the philosophy on which the system are built.

Hidden workers behind offshore outsourced online customer services are still suffering significant consequences inherited from colonial systems. The report is based on a review of 158 live-chat conversations between the online audience and two customer service agents based in Pakistan and outsourced by UK companies. This online chat platform was created and designed for the participatory art project 'How May I Serve You'. Analysis of the conversations demonstrated how outsourced companies survey employees chats and physical behaviours, threaten pay cut or dismissal, and demand that the agents lie about their identity. Further research is needed to identify practical solutions to enhance employees' working conditions when working in the online customer service industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study investigated whether the psychological contract predicts organisational identification in a call centre setting. Participants included 198 employees (females = 66%; permanent employees = 74%, temporary employees = 26%). Participants completed measures on psychological contract and organisational identification. Using a logistic regression analysis, the study revealed that various components of the psychological contract (employer obligations, employee obligations, employer violation, and employee violation) had varying degrees of influence on the relationship between the psychological contract and organisational identification. All dimensions of the psychological contract (excluding employer obligations) significantly predicted organisational identification. By paying increased attention to the management of employee and employer beliefs regarding mutual obligations in the employment relationship, psychological contract bonds may be sustained over time, thereby increasing organisational identification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research investigated the interconnected work experiences of Immigration New Zealand (INZ) call centre staff and professional immigration consultants. A mixed methods research design was used. Ten call centre staff and eleven professional immigration advisors were interviewed. Call centre staff also kept work diaries for one week and were observed at work. Findings are discussed in relation to three key issues; firstly, ways in which tensions between the gate-keeping and enabling functions of INZ affected the interactions between staff and callers; secondly, difficulties staff and callers experienced communicating and resolving complex queries within an environment designed for rapid exchanges of information; and thirdly, ways in which call centre staff and immigration advisors managed the emotional labour requirements of their work. The research illustrates the value of investigating the interconnected experiences of staff and users in call centre research and highlights the recurrent trade-offs between efficiency, effectiveness and emotional labour within the call centre environment. It suggests giving staff increased discretion and focussing on response quality rather than volume of calls answered, as these changes could improve the experiences of both staff and users of the call centre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explored call centre agents' perceived psychological contract and job security in a South African call centre setting. We interviewed a purposive sample of 12 call centre agents (female = 8, male = 4; black = 10, coloured = 2; permanent employees = 12; mean period of service = 3 years). The agents responded to semi-structured interviews. Thematic analysis of the data indicated that the call centre agents perceived their psychological contracts with the employer to influence their job security over and above their legal contracts. Call centre agents' perceptions of unmet psychological expectations and obligations contributed to their workplace demotivation and disengagement. We propose a preliminary conceptual model for studying psychological contract and job security among call centre agents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study was conducted to know whether bulk inflow of Non Emergency Calls (NECs) acts as an independent predictor for depression in call handlers of Rescue 1122, Punjab, Pakistan. Forty five (45) call handlers were recruited from evening shift of 9 districts. Similarly, same-sized control group was made out of field rescuers. The groups were compared for rate and severity level of depression using Beck's Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II; Beck, Steer, & Brown, 1996). Probable predictors (except workplace stress) for depression in call handlers were evaluated through risk estimates. For workplace stress, a purposefully developed closeended Workplace Stress Questionnaire including two subscales i.e. Non Emergency call and Control Room Environment of 30 items each was administrated. Twenty nine (64.4%) subjects of study group reported depression on BDI. Consequently, the same group had significantly higher mean depression score than control (18.2 vs. 12.6; p = .00). The scores also showed insignificant association with any of the probable predictors (demographic variables) of the call attendees. The respondents perceived more occupational stress against NECs. The findings attract the attention of authorities towards the severity of the concern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Medicina y Seguridad del Trabajo is the property of Escuela Nacional de Medicina del Trabajo - Instituto de Salud Carlos III and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the underlying asymmetries in training evaluation practices of call centre (CC) firms based on their "in-house" and "subcontractor" ownership heterogeneity.Design/methodology/approach The data for this qualitative inquiry were collected from key informants of 13 different CCs in Pakistan through semi-structured interviews.Findings The findings revealed various asymmetries in training evaluation practices among in-house and subcontractor CCs based on five different dimensions of two renowned training evaluation frameworks.Practical implications Training evaluation professionals can benefit from training evaluation methods identified in this study for measuring training evaluation practice and advancing future research.Originality/value This study has theoretically contributed to the existing research on firm heterogeneity and human resource management by focussing on training evaluation practices in CCs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the biggest challenges for the call centre industry is the high turnover rate. Past studies revealed that affective commitment, organisational commitment, psychological capital, job satisfaction, work environment and problematic customer behaviours were some of the contributing factors of turnover. However, authentic leadership and the role of work engagement as mediators lacked investigation for the service industry in Malaysia. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the influence of four dimensions in authentic leadership on employees' turnover intention in Malaysia call centres with work engagement as the mediating role. A total of 389 online surveys were distributed to employees working in call centres in Klang Valley and Cyberjaya. This study obtained 240 valid samples with a return rate of 60%. The results indicated that self-awareness and balanced processing of information had a significant relationship with work engagement. Work engagement was significantly related to turnover intention. Work engagement contributed as a mediator to some variables towards employees' turnover intention. Hence, leaders are encouraged to manage tasks and relational roles. Different leadership styles have their strengths and limitations which could impact the employees' engagement to the company. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many customer service institutions draw on the (argued over) notion of "customer experience". Gentile et al. (2007) suggest that, at an optimum, the notion assumes a thinking and feeling customer who co-creates their customer experience together with the service providing institution. This co-creation is believed to comprise interactional involvement, personalization and the holistic treatment of the customer's needs. Given the latter, we might expect service providers, such as call centres, to view language as a vital means of creating an experience with the customer. The extant linguistic call centre research, including our own, points to the fact that call centre institutions view language as fundamental to their functioning. However, heavy language regulation tends to be the most important - if not the only - means of achieving outstanding customer experience (Cameron 2000; Jagodziński 2013; Archer and Jagodziński 2015). There is a clear mismatch, then, between the tenets of customer experience and the way language is conceptualized, interactionally managed and regulated. Throughout this paper, we argue that the co-creation of customer experience must be accompanied by its linguistic co-construction, which can only be achieved by giving frontline employees more interactional freedom than they tend to have in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper provides general information about contact centers: their organization, communication channels, and organization of employees. Contact centers can be organized in different ways. In order to be competitive, banks pay attention to meet the clients' needs and enable them new channels for communication. To this end, today's banks provide contact centre services through several communication channels. In addition to the organization of contact centers and communication channels, this paper will also be focusing on contact centre employees. In particular, on the characteristics required from this employee profile, ways to calculate the number of employees per shift, ways to delegate employees, and a few recommendations on how to retain employees. The paper contains detailed information about the contact center of Komercijalna banka a.d. Belgrade, and its organization of employees.

Background A call centre usually represents the first contact of a customer with a given company. Therefore, the quality of its service is of key importance. An essential factor of the call centre optimization is the determination of the proper number of operators considering the selected performance measure. Results of previous research show that this can be done using the queueing theory approach. Objectives: The paper presents the practical application of the stochastic queueing models aimed at optimizing a Slovenian telecommunication provider’s call centre.

Arianna Bove reviews Enda Brophy’s Language Put to Work: The Making of the Global Call Centre Workforce (2018). Palgrave Macmillan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I examine the transnational mobility of digital workers and the control of their labour across multiple production sites. The digitalization of work has progressively allowed businesses to outsource IT-enabled service jobs to cheaper production sites offshore. The growth of the 'offshore outsourcing' of white-collar service jobs in East Asia has produced the mobility of cheap digital labour from Japan to Dalian in northeast China. They work at call centres and other Japanese-speaking workplaces in the lower echelons of the city's IT sector, typically earning salaries in Chinese yuan at, or even below, the average Japanese minimum wage. Based on ethnographic findings, I argue that in the global digital economy, digital services are rendered exploitable through their transnational mobility and that this form of labour migration has developed because of the partial, fluid and contingent nature of the transnational links between the two locations. I analyse how the neoliberal logic of exception underpins the creation of IT parks in China and the casualization of labour in Japan to enable new forms of transnational labour control and capital accumulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The business process outsourcing and call centre industry in India has a high prospect in present and coming future. As women are an essential part of this industry, presently, women workers comprise of nearly one-third of all the call centers and BPO's Indian labor force. Nevertheless, regardless of such an important economic input of women to this industry, quite a few issues and challenges are encountered by women. From having suffered some form of workplace sexual harassment during the course of their work to challenging social dogmas and taboos related to the women in India. Women within the age group of 30's encompasses a mass of the BPO labor force. It is so because call centers prefer women for dealing straightforwardly with the people. Women workers working with BPO's are pulled towards it due to the flexible hours of work which make rooms for meeting their child care requirements. Nevertheless, episodes of crime and dodges in safety reveal stringent measures which are of utmost priority and that government and NGOs both have integral role to play to make work place gender inclusive. In our paper we want to highlight the challenges and measures of call centre workers in India. These call centres are the front runners taking advantage of the dynamically changing social, economic and cultural set up yet at the same time are also marred by the closed box thinking of the stereotype roles that are assigned to them by the makers of the society who want them to walk on the dotted lines set by them. Dogmas are meant to be broken and that is what women of today's India are doing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study sought to assess the extent to which professional efficacy mediates the relationship between personal factors and career adaptability in a call centre work setting. The sample consisted of 409 early-career South African call centre workers (black females = 66%; age range 25 to 40). They completed measures of professional efficacy, career adaptability, sense of meaningfulness, and emotional intelligence. The results of the mediational analyses revealed that professional efficacy significantly mediate the personal meaningfulness (sense of coherence) and career adaptability relationship, but not the emotional intelligence-career adaptability relationship. Emotional intelligence independently predicted career adaptability. Call centre agents with professional efficacy are likely to be more work engaged as a result of their sense of meaningfulness and emotional intelligence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study investigated age and tenure effects on the relationship between job demands and resources, and job-related burnout and work engagement. Study participants were a convenience sample of 382 call centre agents in the information technology industry in South Africa (females = 54%; black African = 47%; single = 47%). The call centre agents completed the Job Demands-Resource scale, the Burnout scale, the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale, and the Work-related Sense of Coherence scale. Multiple hierarchical regression analyses and moderation analyses revealed that age and tenure moderated the relationship between overload, insecurity, and burnout. Tenure moderated the relationship between organisational support and work engagement. Interventions to foster job resources for work engagement and healthy work participation should take into account the work-related sense of coherence of call centre agents as well as their age and tenure. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents a system for multi-label classification of text data processed in Call/Contact Centre (CC) systems. The solution presented herein constitutes a significant innovation and an advantage in relation to the solutions used so far in CC systems, as the contents can be automatically routed directly to even several agents with different competences (depending on the number of classes recognised in the message). The proposed approach combines a set of vectorisation methods, dimensionality reduction methods, and a classifier based on artificial neural networks. Analyses were performed using data from real databases of a large commercial CC system and data extracted from the publicly available Stackoverflow database to evaluate the effectiveness of the developed classification method. The proposed approach was compared with the existing text data classification methods. The method enables classification of text messages belonging to one or more classes and can be used to automatically route contents to agents with appropriate competences. • Development of a multi-label classification method for the Contact Center industry. • Analysis of the method efficiency depending on the values of the parameters. • The approach is the first solution of message routing in the Contact Centre industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A South African national programme to repair government infrastructure uses a contact centre (or call centre) to facilitate and manage communication. An important question is: How does the contact centre benefit the programme and its projects? This study discusses the findings of a survey that quantified the benefits of the programme when the communication between team members in the programme was improved by using a contact centre. The results show that, by using a contact centre to improve the communication between project team members, their perception of communication effectiveness, quality of project deliverables, service delivery, and customer satisfaction of the programme dramatically increases.