“The customer experience is the new battleground!” Forbes’ celebrated rallying cry shows no signs of abating.

A new year is upon us and with it the perennial problem of how to improve call centre agent motivation.

If you want people to perform better, you reward them, right? Wrong.

"Then he shouted, ‘you f***ing P**i b***h!" I was shocked and said ‘pardon?’ Then he shouted it again. I said, ‘I could report you for that sort of language’ but he carried on yelling and screaming so I ended the call.”

These days it seems that you can’t even buy a cup of coffee without a company asking you to complete a survey.

Employing homeworkers certainly has its advantages. The most obvious being the ability to cut overheads and ironically reduce the number of call centre sick days.