Marco Adria

Making Room for the Call Center

Abstract A call center can dramatically improve an organizations ability to serve its customers. in this article, three important questions are addressed for senior managers and executives who are establishing or expanding a call-center operation. First, as employees focus on responding to customer inquiries, will their skills become narrower and ultimately less beneficial to the organization? This article argues that skills for employees in call centers can and should be upgraded. Second, will the decentralized decision-making of the call center lead to a loss of managerial control? the article suggests ways of ensuring that the ideal configuration of decentralized decision making and centralized control takes hold in the organization after the call center is established. Third, how can an organizations teamwork and corporate spirit be maintained and enhanced after the establishment of a call center? the article offers practical advice for enhancing an organizations culture even as employees begin to spend less time in face-to-face interactions.

Centralization as a design consideration for the management of call centers

A call center and its associated information technology (IT) provide an opportunity to redesign and improve service-delivery operations. Managers at all levels should understand the role of organizational design as call centers are established or expanded, in particular the relative centralization (distribution of authority) associated with delivering services to customers. This article argues that centralization moderates and influences the organizations efforts to improve customer service through the implementation of the call center and its IT. If managers fall to capitalize on the particular way that centralization moderates between IT and competitive strategy, the organization may not enjoy an important benefit of the call center, which is competitive advantage through increased efficiency and improved customer service. Based on survey responses from 68 call-center managers, the authors found that both centralization and decentralization are associated with call-center service operations. While the call center provides managers with the ability to influence decision-making (centralization), there are also opportunities for agents in the call center to exercise authority in managing the organizations communications with customers (decentralization). Implications for organizational practice are considered.

Technology, Preprocessing, and Resistance—A Comparative Case Study of Intensive Classroom Teaching

In this article, the authors report on two international case studies that used comparable applications of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and were undertaken in comparable academic areas and levels of study. In the two cases, the authors explored faculty resistance to the use of ICTs for teaching and learning in higher education. The two cases differed in institutional context and some student characteristics. The cases were significantly similar in the codification of teaching and learning activities using ICTs. This codification is associated with an occasion for transforming the role of the instructor. The authors present potentials and pitfalls of this teaching mode.

The Organizational Meaning of Research

Practitioners and theorists have given attention recently to the role and status of research activities in Canadian university continuing education units. For individuals in units that are increasing the proportion of their organizational activities devoted to research, there will be an ongoing process of cognitive change and development as a new organizational culture emerges. Sensemaking is used in this article as a heuristic for exploring the process of incorporating and developing research activities in university continuing education units. Sensemaking is the cognitive process of justifying or legitimating a decision or outcome after the decision or outcome is already known. It is associated with organizational models that reject an exclusively rational decision-making paradigm of organizational action. Sensemaking recognizes the centrality of the following elements in the interpretation of research activities and their relationship to organizational life: time, identity construction, and the ongoing creation of context. The authors provide an extended reflection on the process of meaning-making that may be experienced by individuals as conventional research becomes a more important part of organizational life. Such a reflection may support and inform the change process as it occurs in university continuing education units.