Earn more, learn more, and realise your potential Mobile Technology email newsletter Get ZDNet's mobile news and reviews. The industry must shape up, argues Ken Young Unglamorous things have a habit of creeping up on you. Rising damp, game shows on TV, and now call centres.
Call centres are a triumph of technology over cheap labour.
They get right what the dot-com generation got wrong. They automate customer contact without taking out the human interaction. That's why the call centre industry has been growing at about 20 percent a year in the UK and over 400,000 people now work in it. It's salutary to remember that we had telephones for nearly half a century before we realised their true potential for marketing and customer support. But it is also salutary to note that, now that call centres have been developed, some managers are using technology to monitor staff to the nth degree and are creating the human equivalent of battery farms.