How will you develop an organisational culture to overcome the potential for this sort of work to become alienating in the same way as many mass-production oper¬ ations in manufacturing?

Recently there has been a dramatic growth in the number of call centres. These are large groups of staff gathered together at a centre to deal with much, if not all, of the dealings between the business and its customers. This development is made possible by advances in telecommunications and is made necessary to overcome many of the inefficiencies and delays that come from having to rely mainly on communication by post. Typically the call centre is geographically remote from the rest of the business. Often this is to avoid the high labour costs of south-east England, but there is also a view that regional accents are more acceptable to customers than those from the south-east.