Scots compete against Irish in call-centre market

Who would you want to phone to buy a holiday or home insurance; Liam Neeson or Sean Connery; Graham Norton or Billy Connolly; the Corrs or Annie Lennox? It seems most of them would do better than Michael Caine, Harry Enfield or Lisa Stansfield.

Research shows that Scottish accents are more appealing than the English in selling down the line. The English in particular tend to bracket their compatriots according to social class. Those who run their businesses by phone also say Scots are better at closing a deal, and that their reputation for canniness does well in selling financial services.

But they have tougher competition from the Republic, which is also using its verbal charms to great tele-commercial effect. These Celtic cousins are in competition for domination of Europe's burgeoning call-centre market, growing at an estimated 1216 per cent per year. While Irish eyes are smiling, the Scots advertising pitch cheekily claims their smiles are in their voices.

For Scotland, by contrast, the transition is from a fabled past of big and bold engineering. Blantyre, for instance, is a small town in Lanarkshire, nearly 20 miles from Glasgow, at the heart of what was once one of the world's industrial superpowers.

But heavy engineering has all but died in Scotland. Only one deep coal mine remains open. The only steelworks closed five years ago. Scotland's last major merchant shipbuilder is being sold by Kvaerner and under threat of closure.

Blantyre is now better known for First Direct, pioneer in Britain of phone-only bank accounts, which recently opened a vast call centre there, on schedule to have 5,000 employees within five years. Throughout the country, there are 172 call centres, employing nearly 29,000 people, and with 6,000 more jobs scheduled by next January. So-called "shared-service centres", combining tele-commerce with back-office operations, are at a much earlier stage of development, with only 11 units employing 1,500 people. While post-industrial Tyneside and Merseyside strive to catch up, Scotland accounts for 30 per cent of the British call-centre association membership.

The old industrial heartland around Glasgow is where most of the jobs are being created. That is where the workforce is most plentiful and where the Scottish education system makes them more trainable than in England. Paisley University has a degree course in call-centre work, in a bid to boost the value-added end of the business.

But the success is also around Edinburgh, where the country's financial sector is based.

Sky Television has one of Europe's largest call centres in nearby Dunfermline, employing 2,500 people and handling up to half a million calls a week.

A well-developed infrastructure in the Highlands and Islands allows economically fragile areas to join in. In Thurso on the far north coast, for instance, BT, Britain's telecom giant, has one of its 10 Scottish call centres, providing technical support for the company's in-house computer users. At a small centre on the Isle of Bute, they deal with Daily Express reader offers. And political pressure in the new Scottish government is adding to pressure for more rural units.

The pitch from Locate in Scotland (LiS), the government's inward investment agency, is that costs in Scotland are nowhere near as high as operating in Dublin, and that the whole country is geared up for the technological requirements of large-scale tele-commerce, whereas only pockets of the Republic are. Call failures, faults and installation are all reckoned to be better in Scotland.

But there are weaknesses. A major one is that Scotland does not have the same incentives regime offered in the Republic, or the European funds. And it lacks the same international outlook. Call centres tend to be focused on the British market, and there has been much bemoaning the dire state of European language learning in Scottish schools, despite their general superiority over English ones.

That said, Scottish universities are bulging with foreign students, many willing to stay on after graduation and work in their own languages. IBM in Greenock is targeting them in boosting its workforce up to 500 highly skilled people providing tele-support for computer users across Europe. LiS claims there are 7,000 multi-linguists available for work, speaking more than 40 languages.

The other weakness, shared by Scotland, the Republic and the vast American market, with four million call-centre workers, is that the boom may turn into bust if the technology becomes obsolete. The growth of electronic commerce offers no advantage to those who speak English with a lilting accent.

But as pointed out by Mr David McFadyen, European director of LiS, it will be some time before a computer programme can diagnose and repair a computer fault as well as a real live human being at the end of a phone line.