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he country. There were cases where there was language barrier between the customer and the call agent. Therefore, in such cases agents were seen to transfer such calls to another agent who they knew could speak the language. This ability was meant to be of an advantage in cases of where the agent had a difficult issue from a customer and needs help from either a supervisor or a colleague but rather it turned out to have a bad effect especially on the agent that kept receiving such calls. This was because the agent became overworked having to deal with meeting his own target as well as answering such transferred calls. However, it is worth noting that these transferred calls are not counted for the agent who eventually handles the call but rather for the initial agent who transferred the call to his colleague. This did not seem fair to some of the agents due to the volume of calls they handled in addition to the transferred call. This was eventually addressed by management by recruiting more call agents solely on the language criteria and the system modified to direct such calls to only the appropriate agents. Agents also took advantage of this ability and were constantly transferring calls to their colleagues for no reason apart from them trying to meet their target.

ISSUES OF CALL AGENTS WITH MANAGEMENT Nature of work: From the call agents? point of view, management has a blur idea as regards the nature of the call centre job. They are of the opinion that management do not regard or acknowledge their hard work despite the conditions under which they perform their duties. Times when they approached management to review their working conditions by reducing their targets and increase the talk times, their request was turned down and quoting an agent, 'The job of a call agent basically entails sitting down for a few hours and all they have to do is either receive or make certain amount of calls, how hard can that be'. This shows that management including other departments generally has a wrong impression about call agents and the nature of their jobs. They have little or no idea on the intense labour process of the call centre. The researcher had the opportunity of observing them for a few days and was of the opinion that the job is a lot more than just receiving calls. The mere fact of sitting in a particular position for a few hours, watching them repeat the same activity continuously was so exhausting. This was a very enlightening experience for the researcher as regards the nature of work of the call agents. Education: There is also the false impression management has concerning the level of education the call agents possess. There is the general belief that call agents are not well educated. But the researcher discovered that the contrary was the case. Most of the call agents are first degree holders from reputable universities, others had diplomas from the technical schools and a few percentages of them have attained their masters? degree. But due to the wrong impression people have about the call centre, the job is not generally regarded with prestige as other professions. This explains why management when approached to review their work conditions or their salaries utter statements quoting an agent, „Management believes that high school children can equally get the job done with a lower salary. So if they are not ready to do the work they can resign?. Following the discussions and observations the researcher ha