Do Call Centers Need to Look Like Something from "Dilbert?"

For someone who spent their entire career working in a formal office setting, or the ubiquitous “cube farm,” a visit to a technology company in Silicon Valley is an eye-opening experience. Most of the office space is dedicated to informal work areas or common areas, and employees roam the premises, inside and outdoors, with laptops, tablets and smartphones. Meetings are held not in a blank rectangular room with a large table, but in lounge areas. The feeling behind these open office environments is that relaxed, and mobile employees are collaborative employees.

The contact center is one of those departments that hasn’t quite caught up yet. A typical contact center set-up has agents working in rows, anchored to desks and walls by PCs and headsets. A few brave companies, however, are beginning to take the open office concept and apply it to the contact center.

San Francisco-based Airbnb supports customers in its “CX Hub” in Old Town. The contact center, which was designed by Bora Architects, bears little resemblance to a typical customer support facility. Bora’s Michael Tingley told Portland Monthly that the goal was eliminate the horror of the boiler room call center.

“Airbnb was really intentional about creating an environment to not feel like a call center,” he said. “So one of the first things was to not consider it a place where you sat at a desk and put partitions around you, creating the awful environment from the Dilbert cartoons. In some respects, this environment feels like the antithesis of an office.”

The company uses advanced headset technology to cancel outside noise for agents and enable them to hear both themselves and customers without having to shout over other representatives. Bora Architects chose sound-absorbing building materials – cotton padding in the ceiling and wall tiles – and covered the hardwood floors with area rugs. The company also built felt-lined “nooks” into the space where agents could work apart from the main space if they chose, using laptops.

In a recent blog post, Monet Software (News - Alert) CEO Chuck Ciarlo noted that the open floor plan may be leading to better collaboration between agents, which is important for companies striving to provide an omnichannel experience to their customers across multiple channels and multiple agents.

“There is more freedom of movement, as laptops now do everything that a desktop computer does, so employees do not need to be tied down to one plugged-in machine,” Ciarlo wrote. “There is more interaction between agents, but the work can still get done.”

Given that the contact center has some of the highest turnover in the business world, providing a comfortable, welcoming space for workers is a great idea. (The Airbnb contact center has a café area.) Happy, comfortable, relaxed agents generally lead to happy, comfortable, relaxed customers, and keeping turnover low and customer satisfaction high easily pays for more expensive contact center design in the long run.

Ciarlo wonders if this could be the future of the customer support industry, particularly as companies need fewer human agents as automated support gets better.

“With more customer contacts now being handled online or other means, fewer call center agents might make it possible to accommodate such flexible facilities,” he noted. 

Edited by Alicia Young