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Human work in call centres: A challenge for cognitive ergonomics

Article  in  Theoretical Issues in Ergonomics Science · January 2001

DOI: 10.1080/14639220110104943

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 Theor. Issues in Ergon. Sci., 200?, vol. ??, no. ?, 1–16

Human work in call centres: a challenge for cognitive ergonomics

Sebastiano Bagnara* and Patrizia Marti

Università di Siena, Dip. ‘Scienze della Comunicazione’, Via dei Termini 6, I-53100 Siena,
Italy

Keywords: ???

Many people are currently working in call centres and much more are expected to
work in them in the near future. Call centres are, in a sense, ‘modern factories’
where services are delivered through information and communication tech-
nologies. The human activity within the dynamic and articulated reality of such
work settings offers new challenges for cognitive ergonomics. Indeed, work in call
centres has to be conceptualized in terms of distributed knowledge. This means
that only part of the knowledge needed to carry out any transaction is (or rather
has to be) in the mind of the operator; relevant knowledge may be distributed
among colleagues in the organization, available and accessible cognitive artefacts
in the work environment, and clients. This paper discusses the potential contribu-
tion that human factors and cognitive ergonomics can provide in tackling the new
and old problems that emerge in organizations where knowledge is an asset.

1. Introduction
Call centres may be defined as ‘physical or virtual operations in which a managed
group of people spend most of their time doing business by telephone, usually work-
ing in a computer-automated environment’ (Merchant 1998). People directly
involved in these operations are named in many ways, for example as telephone
agents, telephone operators, telephone communicators, telephone sales representa-
tives (TSRs), customer service representatives (CSRs), customer consultants, cham-
pions, assistants and, simply, representatives (Reps). They are usually called ‘agents’,
that is to say ‘people working within a call centre whose main job is to handle
incoming and/or outgoing telephone calls’. As we shall see, such definitions capture
only some of the generic components of operations in call centres, and of agents’
work.
These days, when the typical call centres can be characterized as the organiza-
tional nodes managing relationships with customers, agents are knowledge workers.
Indeed, they manipulate internal (personal) and external (distributed among collea-
gues, organizational structures, cognitive artefacts in the work environment, and
clients) knowledge to solve often unexpected problems and manage long-lasting
dynamic relationships and processes.
However, when discussing call centres, it is the explosive quantitative dimensions
that immediately attract attention. The numbers are impressive.
Call centres are a huge economic phenomenon. Authoritative research estimates
that overall market for call centre technology and services will grow up to $30 by
2004, from around $7.1 billion at the end of 1999. If one includes infrastructure, such

* Author for correspondence. e-mail: bagnara@unisi.it

Theoretical Issues in Ergonomics Science ISSN 1463–922X print/ISSN 1464–536X online # 200? Taylor & Francis Ltd
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI 10.1080/14639220110104943

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 2 S. Bagnara and P. Marti

as computer systems and buildings, the total forecasted amount is at least doubled.
The overall European call centres market is growing at a 40% rate.
Call centres are a great social phenomenon. It is one of the most rapidly growing
forms of employment. According to Datamonitor, 1.3% of the total European
workforce (more the two million people) will be employed in call centres by
around 2003. This industry has accounted for as much as 37% net of all new jobs
in Europe over the past 3 years. In East Asia and Australia, the figures are very
similar. In USA, more than five million new jobs have been created since 1990 in this
sector. By some estimates, one out of 20 jobs in the US is in a call centre now; by the
year 2005 that figure may be one out of seven.
Other sources give different figures, but it is certain that the number of call
centres and of the people employed is increasing. On average, call centres are grow-
ing at something like 30–35% per annum in terms of calls volumes, and 20–25% per
annum in terms of agents’ amount.

2. The evolution of call centres

The numbers are impressive if one considers that call centres initiated only recently,
in the 1960s. However, the figures veil the fact that present call centres are not
actually the same, although they all belong to a complex technological, economic
and social phenomenon.
This phenomenon can be differentiated in phases as for the technology used, the
functions carried out, the aims pursued and the competencies required of people
working in them. The peculiar characteristics of the different phases in the evolution
process of these systems of distant relationships with the clients are not just passed
and vanished. Indeed, even the original phases in evolution can actually be found
within many up-to-date call centres, or call centres within an area can show differ-
ential evolutionary characteristics. However, it may be useful for descriptive pur-
poses to single out the main phases in the evolution of the call centres as a function
of technologies used, aims pursued and competencies required. Doing so allows one
to identify four phases, and correspondent types of call centres can be identified since
the first one was opened: claim office, claim factory, communication node, and sell-
ing node (see table 1).

2.1. The claim office

The first call centre was established in the late 1960s when a US Federal Judge
ordered the Ford Motor Company to establish a ‘free phone line’ to facilitate the
recall of faulty cars. To comply with this obligation, AT&T and Ford developed the
‘800’ number. Since then, call centres have been concealed, invisible offices behind
phone-based services designed to ease consumers’ access to companies and public
administration for claims, and, later on, for booking purposes.
It was a cost-saving solution that allowed centralizing demands and specializing
replies focused on keeping calls simple and short.
The operators were asked to possess limited knowledge (usually about a specific
product and fault), some communication skills (politeness and kindness were
enough) and linguistic skills (to understand various regional variations). Their
tasks were repetitive, and there was a need to address boredom and the ability to
counter quantitative cognitive overload. Workstations were designed to keep the
operators protected from mutual noise interference: the consequence was (and is)
social seclusion.

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Table 1. A schematic view of the phases of evolution of call centre as a function of their
scope, prevailing technology, focus of activities and knowledge and skill required to opera-
tors.

The call centre evolution

Phase/scope Technology Focus Knowledge

1. Claim office Phone Short standard reply Limited knowledge;

some common skills
2. Claim factory ACD (automatic call Cues handling Limited knowledge;
distribution) limited common skills
3. Communication CTI (computer tele- Customer satisfaction Communication skills
node phony integration)
4. Selling node Web-enabled Show-tell-sell Negotiation and
trust-building skills
and/or specialized
knowledge

Some present-day outsourced call centres share many of these features, as do

many of their workers. An alternative is now available for standard claims and
requests: It is the IVR (Interactive Voice Responder), which automates frequent
standard requests and replies for low-premium customers.

2.2. The claim factory

During the 1970s, the hidden claims offices and the invisible workers inside them
remained a rather small reality, despite the fact that dramatic changes in customers’
behaviour began to emerge. Consumers tended to prefer personalized, rather than
mass-market goods and services, and people started to require assistance in using the
products they had bought. Buying and selling were no longer seen as one-off activ-
ities: they had become long lasting, dynamic and communication-based processes.
Changes in consumers’ attitudes modified the demands and requests coming into
call centres. Claims still accounted for the overwhelming majority of calls, but they
become less common as new personalized products and services came on the market.
Operators in call centres had to support the clients along the whole life cycle of the
products. They had to preserve and improve the relationship between the organ-
ization and its clients by keeping track of the dynamics of questions and replies.
Of course, such caring activity was possible when there were only a few clients
and products, but even then the cognitive burden could be very high. Call centres
that were designed to answer standard claims relating to a limited number of mass
products and services could not cope with the new situation. As a result, their
performance rapidly deteriorated; long queues and low-quality replies became a
painful and daily experience for customers.
In the late 1980s, a technological solution (the integration of computers and
digital telephones) came on stream: the Automatic Call Distribution enabled queues
to diminish and performance to improve. The hidden service office became a visible
service factory.
The operator’s working conditions did not change very much, though. Measures
to counter noise interference were stepped up, but, despite the widespread use of

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open-space working environments, social isolation was still the order of the day.
Moreover, their skills did not change much either. The knowledge needed was still
mostly in their heads: it was very limited in scope. Communication skills remained at
a very basic level. It was acknowledged that they had to tolerate stress because of the
monotonous tasks and boredom.
The high variation in the number of calls during the day, week or season had
been dealt with by employing staff as and when they were needed. This led to the
introduction of the still largely adopted ‘three thirds rule’, whereby the workforce in
a call centre consisted of one-third full-time employees, one-third part-timers, and
one-third temporary workers.
As for work organization, the ‘service factory’ was seen as the solution, and
Tayloristic design and practice followed. The work is decomposed into fragments
whose execution does not need very much practice, knowledge and experience. It
means that any request from a customer triggers a process of replying composed by
sub-units, each of them executed by a dedicated worker. In such a situation, the
customer rarely experiences a ‘one call solution’ (s/he may be forced to call several
times even for a minor request). Moreover, a person different from that who received
the original call often communicates the solution.
Of course, stress responses, high absenteeism, high turnover (more than 20% per
year), and difficulties in personnel recruitment, management and retention were very
predictable outcomes. Indeed, as some authors (for example, Kjellerup 2000) main-
tain, this type of call centre easily becomes an example of a ‘toxic organization’:
because of the heavy workload and lack of work satisfaction, it is often a place where
people work in order to make money, and then move on.

2.3. The communication node

By the 1990s, the call centre had become a profit rather than a cost centre. It became
clear that it was vital to take care of and retain clients. In order to pursue this aim,
the process of communication with the customer had to be supportive, dynamic and
long lasting. A breakdown in communication meant a net loss of revenue. The call
centre was a place where the organization found out about clients’ needs and their
changing attitudes.
The call centre acquired a proactive function, and it also had marketing, testing
and promotion objectives. The call centre became dedicated to customized inter-
actions, and it focused on keeping track of, and making use of, all transactions.
In previously described types of call centre, the number of applications operator
had to handle during a conversation was usually very high. Access to stored knowl-
edge was painstaking, and the quality of knowledge distribution between operator
and artefacts was poor. The development of the integration of telecommunications
and computer technology (ICT) helped in tackling these problems by making it
possible to record, elaborate and extrapolate information through powerful arte-
facts. The ICT-based artefacts made conversations easier and actively memorized
them (Merchant 1998): transactions with clients could be stored and retrieved during
any call. In addition to the dynamics of claims, the recording and processing of
transactions with clients made information about their desires and skills—not to
mention their spending attitudes and opportunities—all possible. The service had
become truly customer-oriented.
Operators were still required to have knowledge about the content of inter-
actions, but their core competence involved understanding clients’ requests and

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finding, accessing and manipulating knowledge in the organization and in the cog-
nitive artefacts. Communication skills were at a high level: the competence was the
ability to manage surprise and unforeseeable events. Stress came from tension in
facing unpredictability rather than from repetition and boredom, and work had to be
carried out in teams because of the complexity and value of the demands. It was
important to adopt a distributed-knowledge approach and teamwork-based organ-
ization. Unfortunately, the ‘factory model’ was still generally found.

2.4. Selling node

Nowadays, the scope of call centres is changing: far from being centralized claim-
handling offices, they are now becoming business centres. They are profit-seeking
nodes rather than cost-saving structures to be scaled down. Communication is no
longer initiated solely by clients, as an increasing proportion are initiated from call
centres for learning, marketing, negotiating, promoting and selling purposes. The
call centre is becoming a selling node that combines previous ACD, CTI and new
Interactive Voice Responder (IVR) technologies with web-based communication.
The core is still communication designed to keep and improve relationships with
clients, but the possibility of adding ‘show’ to ‘tell’ multiplies commercial capacity.
Currently, there are fewer and fewer calls, and more multi-channel asynchronous
communication transactions.
Finally, the combination of high-speed digital telephone networks and the
sophisticated software and switching technology that underpins modern computer
telephony integration now make it possible to re-route calls and messages anywhere.
Remotely-based agents can be managed as if they were all geographically in the same
place. This is where call centres and telework merged. While consistent deployment
of the web-enabled call centre (WECC) is still some way off; there is ample evidence
of a proliferation of innovative applications. It is forecast that during the period
2002–2004, WECCs will match the increasing uptake of web technologies within the
organization (Intranet), across the supply chain (Extranet) and with the on-line
population (Internet).
A WECC can integrate the various media in the process of contacting the client
or, as some recent cases suggest, it may follow a process of differentiation. The two
trends (integration vs specialization) may influence operators’ competencies: media
integration will further develop the current tendency in operators’ competence
towards knowledge manipulation and integration, collaboration and team working.
Specialization may instead indicate a process towards call centres focused on one or
more ‘service products’ in which the content rather than simply communication may
be the core of the operator competence. In both cases, the focus will be on trust
building and ongoing relationships. Both trends indicate the evolution of jobs in call
centres from generic towards professional roles.

3. People and organization in call centres

The technological innovations, the changes in consumers’ attitudes, the shortening
of the life cycle of the products and the push toward their personalization, the
integration of products and services have had a formidable impact on the actual
human work in the call centres. However, changes in technologies and activities seem
not to be noticed in the organization of most call centres.
The organization is still largely based on the work activities forced into tasks
structures, as in the early phone-base centralized claim offices when the calls con-

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cerned very predictable content. At that time, work in a call centre was very similar
to those of a telephone operator, and characterized by repetitiveness and boredom.
Instead, people in the modern call centres carry out complex activities, where unfor-
eseeable problem solving and surprise are continuously experienced. Instead of bore-
dom, the crux is tension and mental effort.
However, because of the outdated and wrong idea of the work in call centres and
because they are still very often conceived and designed as if they were spending
structures, the objective is to reduce the costs by very well known and traditional
methods. People are concentrated in one location and a sort of Tayloristic ‘factory’
model of work is adopted. The priority is speed rather than quality: on average, 72%
of the calls are answered within 10 seconds by a human agent, and the average time
to close a call is less than 2 minutes in high performance call centres in telecommu-
nications (see e.g. Merchant 1998).
The technological push and the organizational setting make obscure the fact that
people day-by-day are in charge of facing a continuous flow of unpredictable
demands and complex activities within the constraints of a Tayloristic framework.
Due to this vision, the workplace is designed to isolate reps and leave them alone
in their relationship with the clients. The push on quantitative performance (e.g.
reducing interaction time) strengthens isolation. Agents have a very limited view
of the system they work in. Teamwork is rare: the physical set-up of the workplace
and organizational procedures prevent organizational learning. Technologies are
usually poorly integrated (see e.g. Ackerman and Halverson 2000). A recent bench-
marking considered 200 European and USA call centres (Merchant 1998): it shows
that in 69% of communication transactions the agent has to switch among three or
more applications.
In general, improvements in interfaces and dialogue tools with the technologies
are very often postponed, even if they are troublesome aspects of the activity. Indeed,
agents have to overcome usability problems of software applications, socio-cultural
problems to keep an acceptable level of communication quality; and organizational
problems related to the knowledge of the whole process. Moreover, although agents
are supposed to master the relationship with the market, and possess knowledge
about products, services, processes and clients, they are managed as industrial
workers.
The organizations put the burden of high performance and smooth functioning
on quite young people that possess rather high education but are offered low qua-
lifications and salaries. The career is vague. Often, there is no career at all. Most of
the people are recruited on a temporary base. Call centres are usually service fac-
tories with a highly flexible workforce: the already mentioned ‘three thirds’ rule is
very often applied. Professional and social statuses are weak. There is not clear
educational and training curriculum. The initial training is very short. As for
labour relations, for the agents either there is no contract at all or the relations
are regulated by the general agreement of the sector a call centre belong to (i.e.
agents have different salaries and bonuses depending on whether they are in the
insurance or in the retailing sector).
At an ethno-methodological observation of their activity (Brown and Duguid
1991, Barley 1996), it is clear that agents develop creative practices to carry out
critical activities and bridge technological and organizational gaps. However, they
are handled as disposable resources.

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 Human work in call centres 7

Of course, stress responses, high absenteeism, high turnover (more than 20% per
year), difficulties in personnel recruitment, management and retention are the
expected outcomes: as previously noticed, they are often a place one works to
make the money to leave.
However, the activity of operators is critical to the success of a call centre.
Research and surveys alike confirm that human resources form the strategic factor
that makes all the difference in managing the customer relationship. The customer-
focused culture is the main asset when seeking competitiveness and getting the most
out of the customer relation. Technology can support, but never replace, human
resources skilled in communications, problem-solving and caring.
Alhough companies maintain that they are aware of the central role of human
resources, they seldom pay the necessary attention to the training, retention and
career development of agents. Notwithstanding suggestions for improving human
resources management, some paradoxes are apparent:
. Communication and relationship with customers is fundamental for the suc-
cess of a company, but the agents work alone in the relationship: technology
and organization do not adequately support the communication flow;
. Levels of education are usually high, but they are managed according to the
paradigm of the traditional ‘blue collar’ industrial workers. Moreover, agents
do not possess an integrated view of the process: about half of them do not
even know the objective of the call centre they work for;
. Call centres themselves are isolated from the rest of the organization, and there
is little contact, for example, with the sales and marketing departments; and
. There is a need to integrate and develop the technology, organization, per-
formance, jobs and quality of work, and for people to be seen as the hub that
allows the call centre to become a learning organization.

4. Trends and needs

The average call centre is actually a combination of the four different types outlined
above. There are components very similar to those characterizing the claim office:
temporary unskilled workers reply in a standard manner to standard requests by
phone. These components are under a process of automation: Interactive Voice
Responders may, in the near future, suffice to match these low-value added demands.
Although service factories are on their way to disappearing, they will still remain
for an appreciable time. Here, the classical ergonomic has room for intervention for
ameliorating working conditions. There is also a need for ergonomics in accompa-
nying the automation process, for instance in upgrading skills.
There are components where conversations take place and where mutual under-
standing is essential for reaching agreement and satisfaction. This is the core of the
actual call centre: operators talk on the phone, and are in contact with customers.
Customers don’t want to wait too long or to have exhaustive and quick replies from
the company they buy a service from. Usually, the operators are left alone in these
synchronous conversations, although they perceive that for the customer they fully
represent the company. In that mismatch, that is the mismatch between customer
expectations and operators’ perceptions and the actual available (cognitive, organi-
zational artefacts) support, lies the present challenge (mostly cognitive, ergonomic).
There are also asynchronous conversations and communications which increase
rapidly in number and value. Here the core is no more ‘to serve a service’, as a

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classical call centre may be defined in its scope, but it is ‘the service’. There is a
change in nature: from collaborating to render easier the delivery of a service to
performing the whole service process. This component is under way and is developed
rapidly and tumultuously. Here, cognitive ergonomics may play a role in the design,
although it cannot tackle all the objectives to be reached. The case study discussed
below presents in concrete the problems that the late evolution of call centres faces
daily. The example clarifies the role that cognitive ergonomics is called to play within
a systemic approach to work design.

5. The organizational memory

In the following, we present and examine a concrete example of systemic problems
those operators in the call centres face in performing their daily activity. The sce-
nario is an exemplar of the nature of human activity in the call centre: a dynamic
processing of distributed knowledge that is continuously evolving and integrated in
an articulated social, cultural and organizational context.
As noted above, in call centres much of the work consists of adaptive responses
to unpredictable requests. The continuous problem solving flow cannot be con-
strained within stable procedures. People have to overcome the formal Taylorist-
like organization by developing an adaptive informal organization based on prac-
tices. Indeed, the real work organization in a call centre is very far from Taylorism.
The work practices show much co-ordination and collaboration.
However, in call centres people are either very young and new to work or have
come from different sectors and possess various backgrounds and experiences. The
turn-over is very high. The average call centre is only a few years old. Consequently,
there is an obvious difficulty in accumulating and sharing the best work practices.
Most call centres share a critical problem referred to in the literature as the
organizational memory problem (Marti and Bagnara 2000). They have to face how
to accumulate, improve and share the knowledge they continuously create, instead of
keep ‘forgetting’ and losing important chunks of experience needed to effectively
carry out their mission.
Indeed, organizations routinely forget what they have done in the past and why
they have done it. Often they have the information they need, but they do not know
they have it, or, knowing they have it, they can’ find it (Rizzo et al. 1999). A person
with a memory like the average organization would be thought to be suffering from a
neurological disorder (Ackerman 1994, Conklin 1996). This is evident in any organ-
ization, but is much more manifest in the new and fragile organizational entities that
are call centres. Call centres have no past experience to reference at all.
Traditional ways to capture knowledge are corporate forms, organizational
routines (Cohen 1991), checklists, filing systems, manuals, practices, principles, stor-
ies, etc. Most of these repositories of knowledge are the result of a design process
that involves off-line representation of the activity and its manipulation in order to
plan an intervention in the system. However, a large amount of knowledge is in the
organizational culture and in the practice of the workers (Levitt and March 1988,
Walsh and Ungson 1991).
Recently, there have been several attempts to ‘capture’ the knowledge produced
within organizations by their workers. The idea of an organizational memory has
been addressed by some real or prototypical systems (e.g. Owen 1986, Ackerman
and Malone 1990, Slater 1993). These systems try to exploit the potentiality of
the information technology that characterizes the work environments of modern

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organizations so as to capture and distribute the knowledge produced during the

workers’ activity.
It is interesting to note that members of an organization who work primarily
with information technologies are often deprived of ‘distributed cognition’ as it
occurs in many other domains, where people work with tools in a shared physical
space. This makes it harder for individuals to pick up cues towards useful tools and
their utilization, and makes it difficult to share knowledge (Maltzahn and Vollmar
1994).
Indeed, co-operation and peer teaching often occur despite the existing computer
systems rather than because of them. The systems are mostly designed to support an
individual user, and serve to hamper traditional modalities of knowledge sharing
within a community of practice.
The organizational memory problem is acute in most call centres: the knowledge
informally produced by the operators is poorly preserved and irregularly distributed,
especially by those who have acquired more experience inside the organization. This
leads to a ‘lack of experience feedback’ and diffusion of best practices. In the call
centres, only a small part of the organizational knowledge is routinely and easily
incorporated in formal procedures and rules. Many relevant pieces of knowledge
exist in the form of ‘folklore’ (Terveen et al. 1993, Bannon and Kuutti 1996): this is
related to its use, to the individual experience and to the daily practices of work.
Ackerman and Halverson (2000) state the importance and urgency of empirical
studies that can provide designers with the necessary insights to avoid building
systems blindly. Indeed, the organizational memory theory is at a grand scale with-
out empirical data. This is unfortunatez since human cognition can be understood
only if examined as it is naturally situated within the human constructed environ-
ment. Intelligent actions in real work settings cannot be studied by analysing an
individual’s cognitive performance in isolation (Hutchins 1995) since human cogni-
tion is distributed between individuals and the artefacts present in the external
environment.
This position is confirmed by ethnographic studies performed in call centres that
revealed that, even if the production of not-script based knowledge is a spontaneous
behaviour, the current attempts to maintain, re-use and evolve knowledge are not
very successful (Marti and Bagnara 2000):

(a) Memories are captured occasionally and in unstructured ways. They are
mostly externalized using artefacts like ‘job aids’ as notes about the correct
application of a procedure, informative notes, manuals, post-it, e-mail mess-
ages, sheets on the wall, requests to colleagues and to supervisors, oral
transmission of best practices. This knowledge is difficult to manage, in par-
ticular when the operator interacts with the customer.
(b) Memories are not sufficiently shared by the operators. Operators work pri-
marily at their own position without sharing with other colleagues neither
the correct application of a procedure nor the resolution of a successful case.
The luckier situation exists when best practices are transferred orally, with an
informal ‘chain reaction’ inside the group.
(c) Memories are not sufficiently uploaded by means of experience feedback.
Frequently, operators have to consider completely new, unusual or unpre-
dicted requests of clients. In these cases, in order to avoid long delays and to
reduce the time spent in conversation, they take notes in a personal notebook

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about the procedure used in that particular situation. Consequently, different

operators can manage the same client in different ways. The customer is
confused and perceives a low-level service.
(d) Current software applications do not support memories. Most of the knowl-
edge is stored in various software systems without any correspondence to the
operator’s needs during the activity. This leads to difficulties in fast informa-
tion retrieval (sometimes operators have to remember the pathways to reach
information) and information storing. The operators experience a sense of
‘distance’ between the activity, the knowledge available and the level of
system support.
(e) Current communication channels do not support efficacious knowledge shar-
ing. Frequently, front line operators communicate through an intranet with
other operators in the call centre. However, the lack of awareness about roles
and activities in other call centre’s areas makes the activity really trouble-
some.
The following (real) scenario exemplifies the above listed problems.
. . .11:05 am: an operator (O) receives a call from a customer (C) who complains for not
being activated. O tries to reconstruct the history of previous calls in order to discover
where the problem occurred. Unfortunately, the client activation request has not been
stored in the system. C recalls that two faxes were sent to the call centre by his dealer and
by him. O would like to access the received fax folder but he doesn’t know who is in charge
for the client fax management. 11:20 am: O asks the client to wait at the phone and
consults the Supervisor. The only solution is to send a new activation request. 11.30
am: C is irritated and asks for other checks. 11.50 am: The search is unsuccessful. C is
very exhausted, and O asks C to call again. O forgets to record the call in the database. O
consults other software applications available at his working position. The fax is stored,
but in the wrong application, with consequences also on the activation procedure. The day
after, O calls the client and suggests to send the fax again using a dedicated number in
order to avoid other problems. . .

The scenario highlights a number of interesting issues related to memory man-

agement:
(a) Many processes are activated simultaneously:
. Acknowledgement of the caller: O speaks with C and types the informa-
tion into the call tracking record.
. Check of the activation request: O speaks with C, checks the information
into the call tracking record, and tries to reconstruct the history of pre-
vious calls.
. Recovery actions: O asks the Supervisor and colleagues and accesses other
software applications.
(b) The information necessary to solve the problem has a mixed provenance.
This notion was introduced by Ackerman and Halverson (2000) and refers to
the fact that sometimes memories within organizations are individual and
private; sometimes they belong to a group and are public. In order to effec-
tively carry out an activity, different memories should be used together seam-
lessly. Tools that are typically used in an office include private e-mails, public
message boards, group meeting agendas, etc. People manage all of them to
carry out their activity. Even in our scenario, memories have mixed prove-
nance: previous knowledge of the activation procedure telephone, fax, super-

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 Human work in call centres 11

visor, colleagues, software applications. Part of this information is shared in

the working space, part is individual.
(c) Simultaneous processes and mixed provenance of information can create
breakdowns in the activity if not managed seamlessly by the operator.
Furthermore, the scenario highlights a number of more general problems at different
levels:
. Usability of the software applications: information is difficult to find; the opera-
tor activity is poorly supported.
. Organization: the operator does not know the distribution of roles within the
organization.
. Culture: the operator does not trust the client. He is also frustrated by the
scarce support provided by the supervisor. The operator is isolated in the
management of the problem.
. Physical layout: the operator has to abandon his working position to try to
overcome the problem. The client is forced to wait at the phone.
These results show that in almost all the problems to be tackled in call centres,
organizational memory is a composite and articulated problem. Human factors
and ergonomics, and even cognitive ergonomics, can (and have) scarcely contributed
in tackling problems like this (Falzon 1998). It may be that complex and dynamic
work settings like a call centre have to be analysed by adopting theoretical frame-
works different from those based on the classical human–machine interaction
approach.

6. A systemic approach to work design: theoretical issues

As described above, call centres are complex work realities that share the critical
issues (and highlight some peculiar) of modern organizations. They are continually
challenged by the rapid evolution of technologies, products, and services. The
unresting and rapid transformation process may render these organizations fragile
and unstable, also because they do not sediment knowledge and learn from their
experience. We believe that if call centres continue to ‘forget’ and lose important
chunks of experience, they will be impaired in effectively carrying out their mission.
To challenge issues like these, where human, organizational and technological
factors interact, seems beyond the capacities of the classical human–machine inter-
action (Shackel 2000). A way to analyse and design such work-settings is to adopt a
systemic approach that takes into account all the components of the process (usabil-
ity of the software applications, organizational and cultural aspects, the physical
layout).
Recent applications of a systemic approach have already been applied in differ-
ent, although of similar complexity, contexts. In particular, this approach was
adopted in safety critical systems (e.g. train traffic control (Rizzo et al. 2000) and
air traffic control (Marti et al. 2001)), where it was successfully tried out for require-
ment specification, system validation and accident analysis.
Indeed, in all complex work settings, thanks to the availability of advanced
technological tools, operators can demand routine tasks of the system and concen-
trate on higher level mental operations. Therefore, the activity of these operators
evolves towards a flexible and context-dependent process, where the knowledge that
is produced daily is used to face new incoming situations. The most critical situations

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 12 S. Bagnara and P. Marti

are not due to the unavailability of certain information in the execution of a pro-
cedure. Critical situations depend on how different components in the process (soft-
ware applications, organizational and cultural aspects, physical layout, and human
operators) are balanced and interact to avoid or provoke breakdowns in the activity.
For this reason, the analysis of the human activity in complex systems requires an in
depth analysis of the socio-technical context of the work, in order to assess the role
that each component plays in the process.
This holistic view of articulated work systems was elaborated in the well-known
conceptual SHEL model, developed by Edwards (1972), in order to provide a com-
prehensive human factors view of human behaviour in interactive systems that can
easily be understood by designers with a poor human factors background. SHEL is
an acronym for Software, Hardware, Environment, and Liveware. Software refers
not just to computer software but to the rules, procedures and practices that define
the way in which the different components of the system interact among themselves
and with the external environment. Hardware is used to refer to any physical and
non-human component of the system such as vehicles, tools, manuals, signs, and so
on. Liveware refers to any human components of the system in the relational and
communicational aspects. Environment refers to the socio-cultural and organiza-
tional environment in which the different components of the process interact. The
SHEL model concentrates on the interfaces among people and all system compon-
ents, including other liveware resources. The important point about SHEL is that it
offers a system view where humans cannot be considered as isolated from the other
system components.
This already aged view is consistent with recent theoretical work in cognitive
psychology including Distributed Cognition (Hutchins 1995) and Activity Theory
(Nardi 1996).
Distributed Cognition is a theory that investigates the organization of cognitive
systems. Like most cognitive sciences, it takes cognitive processes to be those that are
involved in memory, decision making, inference, reasoning and learning; and char-
acterizes cognitive processes in terms of the propagation and transformation of
representations. What distinguishes distributed cognition from other approaches is
the commitment to two related theoretical principles. The first concerns the bound-
aries of the unit of analysis for cognition. The second concerns the range of mechan-
isms that may be assumed to participate in cognitive processes. While mainstream
cognitive science looks for cognitive events inside individual actors, distributed cog-
nition looks for a broader class of cognitive events and does not expect all such
events to be encompassed by the ‘head’ of an individual. Indeed, Distributed
Cognition shows that much work knowledge is not located in the human mind,
but in cognitive, either organizational or technological, artefacts. It also shows
that cognitive activities are strongly influenced (often facilitated, but also hampered)
and sometimes it is possible and can be performed only when carried in interaction
with the external cognitive artefacts.
Activity Theory is more a collection of principles originated by the cultural-
historical theory of activity initiated by a group of revolutionary Russian psychol-
ogists in the 1920s and 1930s. It assumes that human behaviour is not a set of
disembodied cognitive acts (e.g. decision making, classification, remembering).
Rather, conscious activity takes place in everyday practice and it is inextricably
embedded in a social matrix of which every person is an organic part.

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 Human work in call centres 13

Both theories imply a holistic systemic approach that requires a wide and articu-
lated unit of analysis in order to take into account a subject (individual or group), an
object or motive, artefacts (or tools) and socio-cultural rules and norms. Hence,
human activity should be considered as a socially and culturally organized ensemble
where artefacts play a critical role in mediating human activity. The unit of analysis
is flexible and composed of adaptive groupings of information resources (people,
media, and external environment, the cultural setting), which can vary according to
the requirements dictated by different real situations.
We believe that Cognitive Ergonomics should be inspired by such theories to
face the complexity of work activities like the ones of call centres. Indeed, these
theories allow one to structure field observations and to analyse human activity,
taking into account all components at stake during knowledge management
processes.

7. Conclusions
As indicated by a recent a report on data and trends on people and call centres in the
EU, the following issues have to be tackled in the near future to analyse the human
activity in such organizations (Bagnara 2000):
. Work organization: call centres are usually designed on the model of a factory.
Given the evolution of call centres, work organization should support colla-
borative forms and tools, including the development and sharing of organiza-
tional memories.
. Training: call centres are the largest work group with no training programme.
Training and retraining packages are both unusual and too specific.
. Professional development: since call centres are ‘flat’ organizations, career and
professional development have been rare, and consisted so far of considerable
horizontal mobility from one organization to another. Such mobility masks
the lack of a professional development path, and of intra-organizational mobi-
lity.
. Health: stress symptoms are frequent because people have no experience of the
work, and no cognitive or emotional tools for coping with strains and tension.
. Monitoring and surveillance: the technology in use is much the same through-
out the world, and includes a facility for continuous monitoring of perform-
ance. The mechanisms of surveillance and monitoring contribute to stress, and
there are also legal and ethical factors involved.
. Localization: call centres are usually located where an educated workforce is
available at low cost because of the rate of unemployment or the need to enter
(students) or re-enter (women) the labour market. It means that people have
low negotiation power.
. Labour relations: there have been very few concrete experiences of developing a
local and global framework for labour relations over the last few years.
However, workers in the call centres all over the world raise identical issues
of pay and benefits, stress, working time and workload, equal opportunities
and training, poor working environment and equipment, respect and proper
consultation, and social benefits.
All these issues are challenges for both ergonomics and cognitive ergonomics analy-
sis and research searches for viable solutions. Some of them are quite old and some
others are absolutely new challenges. For example, we are assisting a number of

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 14 S. Bagnara and P. Marti

start-ups per year as never before. Huge call centres with thousands of people are set
up in few years from scratch.
When looking at these issues and at their dimension, it is apparent that there is a
need for a new theoretical framework that encompasses the traditional man–
machine approach towards a systemic, socio-technical view of work activities.
Shackel (2000) observed that even in the old days of ‘knob and dials’, ergonomic
competence was not restricted to the design of the interface. It participated in dis-
cussing and defining larger issues such as those related to work systems design: in
fact it adopted a system approach.
Along the course of its development, ergonomics went through a process of
specialization, and a human–computer interaction area may be seen as a product
of this process. Cognitive ergonomics has tried to keep the wider perspective open by
paying attention to the organization (see e.g. co-operation and collaboration) and
social (see e.g. the communities of practice approach), however the focus on inter-
faces has been largely prevalent. The systemic approach has been lost.
Call centre phenomenon, the start ups of new companies, and the development
of services never seen before force the community of ergonomics and cognitive
ergonomics scholars and consultants to tackle different requests and to than those
they are used to. Sure, interfaces are always there to be designed. However, the
phenomena we enter do not ask just to bring in a solution, but rather to find a
solution within a framework never seen before. Cognitive ergonomics needs systemic
frameworks to tackle positively complex phenomena as call centres are.
In conclusion, analysis of call centres shows new and old issues intertwined,
complex and continuously in evolution. The traditional man–machine approach is
too restricted to tackle the crucial questions that involve the stability and even the
survival of the new organizations, such as call centres, where there is scarce past
experience and memories are difficult to accumulate and to use. A holistic systemic
approach is needed both for identifying and analysing the complex work settings and
for designing the proper solutions.
Beyond the apparent simplicity of answering a call, there are invisible workers
that face complex problems and find day-to-day adaptive solutions. Traditional
human factors did not do (and do not do) very much for ameliorating their con-
ditions and quality of working life. It is not just a matter of good will. Simply,
ergonomics does not ‘see’ them in the proper way.

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About the authors

Sebastiano Bagnara is Professor of Psychology and Human–Computer Interaction in the
Communication Sciences Department at the University of Siena, Italy. His research interests
span from attention mechanisms to human interaction with technological systems. He has
published seven books and over 200 journal papers. Professor Bagnara is on the editorial
boards of the following international journals: Theoretical Issues in Ergonomics Science,
Applied Ergonomics, Cognition Technology and Work, Travail Humain, International Journal
of Applied Psychology, Human Factors and Ergonomics in Manufacturing, and The IEA Journal
of Ergonomics.
Patrizia Marti is lecturer in Educational Technologies at the Communication Science Depart-
ment of the University of Siena (Italy) and in Cognitive Ergonomics at the Industrial Design
Department of the Polytechnic, Milano (Italy). Her research interests are related to interaction
design, spanning from complex, safety critical applications to everyday life objects. She has
published more than 50 articles, in international journals, books and conference papers.

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AQ: `physical or virtual operations in which . . . . .' page ref for quote?

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AQ: Merchant 1998 is Merchants Ltd in refs.

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AQ: ~$30 to be ~$30 billion?

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AQ: `and sometimes it is possible and can be performed only when carried in interaction with the
external cognitive artefacts.' sense?

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AQ: Ackerman, M. S. and Malone, T. W. 1990, location of publisher?

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AQ: Huwis, U., Denbigh, A. and O' Regan, S. 2000, where cited in text?

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AQ: Marti, P., Rizzo, A. and Scrivani, P. 2001, update?

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 AQ: Rizzo, A., Marti, P., et al 1999, page span?

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AQ: Italics ok for names in `About the Authors'?

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