Call center agents have skills that the common opinion rarely attributes to them: They are linguistically talented and have excellent interaction skills. They can handle complex information management, transcribe conversations spontaneously, and perform “articulation work,” and “emotional labor”  i.e. communicating between the worlds of their employers and the customers. The cognitive and linguistic performance is not only invisible to the outside world, however – their own supervisors are often unaware of what they are capable of. This is particularly surprising as call center agents are closely monitored and their performance is being constantly quantified.

WU researcher Johanna Tovar from the Institute for English Business Communication conducted a survey of call center agents in the Philippines and the UK. She attributes this internal and external invisibility to the way skills and success are measured in call centers: mainly on a quantitative basis and supported only by automatically recorded workflow steps that are stored in databases and then evaluated. Criteria include, for example, the speed at which questions are answered or the number of calls taken.

Everything that cannot be recorded automatically by the supervision systems is ignored by managers: The agents’ real skills, which can only be evaluated through qualitative interviews, for example performance reviews, remain unappreciated.

“Invisibilty”: A blessing or a curse for call center agents?

The invisibility of call agents’ expertise and achievements has both advantages and disadvantages for the workers themselves. The systems that evaluate only part of the agents’ work spectrum have a negative effect on stress levels and job satisfaction. At the same time, both agents and lower-level management know how to use the system to their advantage: Calling scripts provided by upper management are recontextualized on an individual basis, and these adaptations result in more successful interactions with customers.

The study has been published in the journal Sociolinguistic Studies.

To the study

Johanna Tovar: “Call center agents’ skills: Invisible, illegible, and misunderstood”
Available here: https://doi.org/10.1558/sols.3955