Lessons Learnt Working with Performance Data in Call Centres

Abstract

This paper details the treatment of performance data in outsourced call centre operations, as encountered by a team of researchers throughout the course of a project. This project aimed at improving support for performance and motivation management in an outsourced customer care contact centre for a large telecommunications company. In particular, we focus on how the practices of capturing, aggregating, and presenting data reflect the operation's overall concern with "reporting upstream" and accountability. As well as, how the technological and organizational infrastructure of the call centre is shaped accordingly. We then discuss some emergent consequences of this organization of data management, which in particular take the form of some tensions between the emergent needs for data at certain levels of granularity and aggregation within the actual operations of the call centre, and its relative accuracy and availability.