Understanding how organisational characteristics of UK contact centres impact their scope for innovation

Abstract

Advances in information and communications technology (ICT) has allowed the location of contact centres to be disjointed from the country they are providing service to, resulting in the UK having to compete with other countries as a location for contact centres, but the UK industry cannot match the low labour cost of many offshore locations. This means that the UK contact centres have to now compete on other factors rather than cost. There are many ways in which organisations can compete but one of the key ways for developed economies to compete is through increased innovation. Therefore the aim of the research is to examine how UK contact centres approach innovation. The research is carried out through a structured methodology of a systematic literature review and comparative case studies. The main findings of the research are that UK contact centres approach innovation in two main ways, either structured or ad-hoc and that they are involved in a range of different types of innovation, with the aim innovation type being process innovation.