This paper explores managerial issues in call centres through two intensive case studies in UK organisations, supplemented by interviews with five operations managers in other call centres. The research explores key issues from the perspective of managers, team leaders, and customer‐service agents. Our findings show a growing professionalism among those working in call centres ‐ in keeping with the prominent role played by call centres in the market value chains of many organisations. Managers are under pressure to meet the potentially conflicting goals of customer service and efficiency in variable circumstances which cause the work load on call centres to alter significantly. In this environment, decisions on the use of technology, and on the roles, skills, and competencies of customer agents, are critical. So too are the ways in which human resource practices are employed in this relatively new and fast‐growing form of organisation.

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Abstract. In this paper we present an abstract metaphor model situated within a model-based user interface framework. The inclusion of metaphors in graphical user interfaces is a well established, but mostly craft-based strategy to design. A substantial body of notations and tools can be found within the model-based user interface design literature, however an explicit treatment of metaphor and its mappings to other design views has yet to be addressed. We introduce the Interface Specification Meta-Language (ISML) framework and demonstrate its use in comparing the semantic and syntactic features of an interactive system. Challenges facing this research are outlined and further work proposed.

This paper describes interface design activity which focused on the tasks perfonned by call centre advisers. The advisers' work is supported by a large database, which offers them a command line interface. Contextual observation revealed that more effort was needed to interrogate the database than to communicate with the customers. A subset of advisers' tasks was used to provide scenarios for the design of a 2D/3D graphical user interface, which was prototyped in Macromind Director™ and evaluated by a user group. Initial feedback indicated that the design metaphor and dialogue style have the potential to radically improve the advisers' interaction with the system.

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