Putting Call Centres in their Place

Abstract

As the popularity of call centres has grown, so too has research on the call centre industry. The existing literature on call centres can be viewed as contributing to four areas; call centre organisations, call centre management, call centre employees, and call centre customers. Despite the large amount of research that has been conducted on the industry in recent times, there are some areas that are often overlooked, in particular, gender, history and development of the industry and, importantly, the impact of place. Call centres remove the need for face-to-face contact with customers. This, combined with the technology used, results in the call centre industry being geographically mobile, with call centres located across the world, serving customers from across the world. The geographically mobile nature of the industry highlights the importance of considering place in research on call centres, both generally and specifically. Important questions that emerge include the impact of place on location decisions, on the nature of work performed, and the impact of place on the way call centre employees are managed. Following a review of the literature, this paper focuses on considering if, and how, place impacts on the HR policies and practices on call centres. The paper concludes by examining the implications of the analysis for future research.