Call Center Work From Employer And Employee Perspective: Two Field Studies From Turkish Banking Sector

Year 2006, Volume: 8 Issue: 2, 22 - 35, 01.06.2006

Gözde Yılmaz Aşkın Keser

Abstract

This paper consists two different studies’ result. First study measured the burnout level and its relation with job satisfaction of call center employees. Results showed that burnout level explained %50 of variance in job satisfaction. Second study documented the effect of electronic performance measurement on call productivity of employees. Monitoring increase the number of outgoing calls and decrease the duration of call which is a desired thing for employers. For the majority of companies call centers become an integral part of customer relationship management. Parallel with this development, number of employees working in call centers continues to grow exponentially not only in developed countries, but also in developing countries like Turkey whose service sector and outsourcing operations of multinational companies pursues its consistent expansion. This creates a need towards understanding call center work. To our knowledge, there are studies which presented findings either from employee perspective (Bain and Taylor, 2000) or from employer perspective (Spkins et al., 1999). This study differentiates from these studies by incorporating employee and employer perspective to call center work with two different studies from Turkish banking sector. First study represents the employee perspective regarding call center work by investigating burnout level of call center employees and its relation with job satisfaction. Results of this study revealed that “burnout” explained % 50 of “job satisfaction” among call center employees. It remains unclear how employers benefitted from electronic performance monitoring and how call center employees reduce their workload which causes burnout among them under consistent electronic performance monitoring. For this reason, second study reflects the employer perspective by measuring the effect of electronic monitoring on call productivity of these employees. Lack of electronic monitoring caused a decrease in the number of outgoing calls and increased the duration of calls. These findings clearly show that call center employees attempted to decrease their high workload by increasing the duration of call and decreasing the number of outgoing calls. There is no doubt that employers benefit from the electronic monitoring by increasing the call productivity of call center agents while this workload cause job burnout among these employees.

Keywords

: Electronic Mail, Mail, Organization, Communication

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