End in sight for call centres?

EasyJet hopes to cut costs by encouraging more people to book flights online

Budget airline EasyJet wants to encourage more people to book flights over the internet rather than the telephone.

Already, about 80% of its sales are carried out on the web, but it hopes that even more customers will decide to book online rather than pick up the phone.

While internet booking is automated, those who book over the phone usually dial into a 240-person strong call centre outside Luton, called EasyLand.

Cheaper phone calls paved the way for a boom in these kinds of call centres in the late 1980s. But does the cheap internet now mark the beginning of the end for them?

Call centre boom

The growth of call centres stemmed from the popularity of insurance company Direct Line, which sold competitive insurance over the phone.

First Direct also led the way with telephone banking in the UK, in turn taking its lead from the US, where telebanking started.

Financial institutions have typically been among the first to seek cost-effective alternatives to the High Street and many have now embraced the internet.

Budget airlines and travel companies have been quick to follow.

The internet is extremely limited in the scope of what it can offer. What it can't do is talk to people about what they should buy

Peter Bain, Strathclyde University

EasyJet is keen to stress that it is not phasing out telephone booking altogether and there will be no redundancies.

"Essentially, we believe there will always be a requirement to book on the telephone (but) we will encourage more and more people to use the internet," an EasyJet spokeswoman said.

The advantages for a business of internet booking or enquiries are clear.

"Compared to the cost of a typical customer voice contact, customer contact via a website is dramatically less expensive," a report from Datamonitor found last year.

Web mix

So far, it appears that companies are reluctant to close down telephone operations and offer an internet-only service.

"Our research is showing that organisations aren't constructing standalone internet operations, they are integrating it with the call centre, with email and with fax. They are now increasingly refering to the operation, not as a call centre, but as a customer contact centre," Peter Bain, lecturer in Human Resource Management at Strathclyde University said.

Some US dot.coms are struggling to offer the level of customer service people are used to receiving from bricks and mortar companies, he said, and to cope, they are having to set up call centres.

He pointed to Amazon.com, for many a dot.com trailblazer, which set up a 600-person call centre in the US last year.

"The internet is extremely limited in the scope of what it can offer. What it can't do is talk to people about why they should buy things," Mr Bain said.

Unifi, the finance workers union which represents many call centre workers, agrees.

"Most people will want to speak to someone and ask questions," a Unifi spokeswoman said.

Insurance company Direct Line says that most people will go online for a quote and then follow it up with a phone call.

"Our strategy is to integrate both, rather than phase one out and phase one in. We don't foresee that customers are going to all want to do everything over the internet," he said.

The Direct Line experience is backed up by research from Datamonitor, whose most recent research on the issue dates from early last year.

It foresees the call centre becoming a customer contact centre, dealing with phone, paper and internet requests.

This could lead to call centre work -sometimes viewed as a twenty first century sweatshop - becoming more attractive for staff.

"Currently most call centre staff would not have joined with a view to embarking upon a career. Instead the work is more about earning a wage while it suits the employee, and is not necessarily for the long-term. This will change," the report said.

Two tiers

What may happen is that some financial institutions reserve the most customer time and attention for those who have most money to invest.

Less-profitable customers may be encouraged to log on, the cheapest way for the company to deal with their business.

"Financial institutions don't want low value customers to be taking up the time of call centre operators," Strathclyde University's Mr Bain said.