Training of Employees in Call Centers - Case Study Example

Call centers plays an important role for Currys proving customers with immediate support and assess to information (Currys Home Page 2008). The main effects of training on the performance in Currys are improved service level delivered to customers and job satisfaction of all centers employees. At call centers in retail environment, employees who are effective at work, who can handle difficult tasks such as those illustrated above, possess particular attributes (Bateman & Snell 2004). Technically, it is referred to as expertise.

These are the employees from whom others seek advice about how to approach a difficult task. Their attributes set them apart from less experienced workers and are also the qualities that other workers aspire to and employers wish more of their employees possessed. These attributes represent the kind of outcomes that should be developed through workplace training. In order to assist the development of expertise, retail organizations like Currys need to understand the attributes that constitute expert performance at work (Armstrong, 2000).

In Currys, this enables the identification of the goals for workplace training and selecting particular strategies to most effectively generate expertise in workers. Understanding these attributes can also help establish bases for guiding the development of and judgments about the effectiveness of workplace training arrangements (Bateman & Snell 2004; Call Center Performance 2008). In Currys, the main effects of effective training comprise the ability to respond effectively to both the everyday and new work tasks encountered in the workplace.

Being effective with everyday workplace tasks is essential, but it is not sufficient for expert performance at work. It is also important and necessary to respond to new and unanticipated tasks. For individual employees, the ability to transfer their vocational knowledge within the retail organization like Currys as new tasks arise and to other work situations is an important attribute one that opens up options and opportunities for their vocational advancement. Employees' ability to accomplish new tasks as well as the everyday ones enhances the prospect of the enterprise being able to respond successfully to new work challenges and changing environments.

Such responses require workers to have expert attributes (Bateman & Snell 2004). Therefore it is important to understand these attributes and how they can best be developed in the retail sector. Because training is a product of everyday thinking and acting, it is inevitable that not all training will be desirable or appropriate. Currys supposes that training that might be considered undesirable and inappropriate is not quarantined in some way in Currys. Some of these outcomes are likely to be associated with unsafe working practices, or with the failure to use the requisite amount of checking and monitoring required for work tasks.

In addition, there may be work practices that encourage exclusiveness and intolerance in the workplace. Inappropriate knowledge, including attitudes and values (e. g. dangerous work practice or exclusive views about gender/race), might well be learnt if it is practiced and/or rewarded in the workplace. Inappropriate training outcomes can arise from incomplete preparation (Armstrong, 2000; Currys Home Page 2008).Differences in the requirements for work extend