Call centres are important for many companies for lots of reasons. First, they are often the primary point of contact between the company and its customers, and so the call centre staff are the company as far as customers are concerned. The company’s reputation is in the hands of those people. Second, call centres have to be accessible 24 hours a day for global companies operating in many time zones and in many languages. Finally, the turnover of staff in call centres is very high, and can be over 90 per cent per year.

People who run call centres therefore have to pay attention to recruiting the best people and treating them well so that they stay with the company. There is some truth in the saying that a happy worker is a productive worker (not always, but often); and it is not a coincidence that First Direct (the online banking arm of HSBC) has year after year won awards for the quality of its customer service and also for how it treats its employees The task You have been contacted by a company seeking to set up its own call centre, and your task in this exercise is to design a study to identify which factors are important for the company to consider in the design of its call centre. Consultants have identified the following general factors as being important:
density of workstations layout of the space ergonomics of the workstation (the chair, the desk, lighting etc.)
colour of the walls the view – is there a view out of the windows?