Emotional Labour in the ITES/BPO sector

ITES/BPO firms handle a host of activities such as customer service, technical

support/troubleshooting, telemarketing, and responding to credit card enquiries.
These activities are primarily performed through call centres.
Emotional labour within a call centre setting is performed in remote mode.
Employees are expected to smile down the telephone and display emotions that
comply with certain norms or standards of the organization, which are designed to
create a desired state of mind in the customer without either party seeing each
other. Moreover, employees are expected to appear happy to serve the customer in
spite of whatever private misgivings or feelings they may have. Handling customers
effectively involves interacting politely with customers over the phone, regardless of
the latters reaction or of their own mood or frame of mind. Apart from the display of
organizationally determined appropriate emotions, employees need to sense the
customers mood and handle the situation such that a positive mood could be
induced in the customer. Promoting customer satisfaction in organizations serving
overseas clients and customers complicated the performance of emotional labour
since it raised issues such as the adoption of accents, the use of pseudonyms and
the disclosure of geographic location. Employees are trained to humour irate
customers by listening to them and by apologizing to them (even if they were rude
and abusive). They are not permitted to react to these customers, regardless of how
they felt. Instead, they are trained to look at the situation professionally, that is, to
consider the customers reaction to be the result of some extraneous circumstance
not attributable to themselves or to look at the experience as a part of their job and
not to the take the conversation as directed personally.
Organizations take pains to establish a service culture through which they can
control employee behaviour. Moreover, the internalization of and compliance with
display rules is maintained through rewards and punishments.
In terms of outcomes, research on emotional labour in call centres has found that
emotional exhaustion due to role performance arose because of emotional
dissonance rather than because of display or sensitivity requirements. It was found
that alleviating emotional exhaustion and enhancing employee satisfaction in this
sector could be achieved by increasing rewards (money, status and esteem),
autonomy (skill discretion and decision authority) and support (from co-workers and
supervisors) as well as by reducing psychosocial demands.