IN THE old days, before call centres as we know them existed, all the information about Northern Electric customers was stored in "chip bags". When you rang Neeb with a query about your bill, a "runner" would speed down the office, rifle through a pile of paper packets and hurtle back to the person who'd taken your call with your details. Any alterations would then be entered by hand, then your "chip bag" would go back into the pile.

Now there isn't even any paper in sight, never mind young clerks running around the office. Your account is held on computer, and the only running the person at the end of the telephone does is to the office water cooler.

The service you get is quicker, more efficient and more convenient.

More than that, call centres are the work phenomena of the late 1990s, continuing to bring thousands of new jobs to the region. Just last week Blurb Direct Ltd announced it was creating 1,000 new posts.

It's estimated that the total number of call centre jobs in the region now tops 18,000. From banking to insurance, household utilities to credit cards, most of us have cause to use them. With Paul or Debbie or whoever, we discuss down a telephone wire our private financial affairs, the details of our new house and car.

What goes on at the other end is a mystery.

By their nature call centres are remote - the voice at the end of the line is our only contact with them. They're anonymous and invisible, and Paul and Debbie may as well be in Canada as down the road.

Although it's now a national company, by virtue of its roots Northern Electric and Gas's call centres are in the North-East, at Team Valley and Thornaby. Together, they employ about 400 people. Most of these are the customer advisers we speak to on the telephone.

At Team Valley, up to 180 at a time work in a vast, open plan office where they're clustered into small groups with a team manager.

With microphones bending round their chins and fingers constantly tapping on keyboards, their eyes gaze forwards as they hold conversations seemingly with their computer screens.

There is little banter between the workers - there's no time for that - but the atmosphere is hardly that of a sweat shop. The room is light, airy and pleasantly decorated. No telephones ring; the only noise, apart from the tapping, is the low hum of voices.

The male and female advisers take up to 60,000 calls a week from Northern Electric and Gas's two million customers nationwide; Mondays and Fridays are their busiest days with 9am-11am and 2pm being peak times followed by another burst from 4pm-5pm.

Their six weeks' training includes how to deal with difficult customers - "be polite, listen to what the customer says and try to be helpful at all times".

Ian Colquhoun, customer services manager, says: "Once upon a time the only people you would speak to on the telephone would be the utilities, now people can conduct most of their business on the phone if they wish. Everyone seems to have a call centre these days, they're the face of the company."

As technology has improved, so customer expectation has risen. Adds Mr Colquhoun: "Customers expect to be on the telephone for a shorter period of time and expect to know when they've finished that the action they require will take place within a finite period. People do expect a higher standard of service now."

But that's not to say everyone likes call centres. While there are obvious advantages in being able to call with a query any time between 8am-8pm Monday-Friday, 9am-5pm on Saturday, many people still prefer face-to-face contact.

In the old days of Neeb, there was an electricity shop in virtually every community in the North-East. Now Northern Electric and Gas boasts enormous superstores at edge-of-town retail parks.

With fewer shops it's hardly surprisingly that the number of customers using the telephone system has increased. Northern Electric believes the future will see more customers communicating via their home computer.

Nonetheless, with call centres how can you be sure that the person at the end of the line will do what you've asked of them? In short, there is no accountability in anonymity.

In fact, the call centre system should ensure more than ever that tasks are carried out as everything is recorded and, at Northern Electric and Gas, monitored. Three quarters of callers get through on their first attempt; those who leave a message will be called back within 24 hours. Fiona Cathie's team allocates the call-backs to customer service advisers whose work is monitored to ensure that they have followed up the calls.

But how can being held in a queue, pressing buttons until you finally get to where you need to be only to be put on hold, be more efficient?

The apparent delay caused by instructions to "press the star button" etc, should, in the long run, ensure that your call is dealt with more efficiently and accurately. With up to 10,000 calls coming into the centre a day, the only way to prevent meltdown is to channel them.

There is no switchboard but there is Beverly Sproat, information system team manager. She is in control of an unfathomable screen of different coloured bars which show the number of calls coming in, the number of calls in queues and the number of staff available. Her job is to continually shift the whole lot around with the primary aim of getting calls answered as quickly as possible.

The measure of the centre's efficiency is the "grade of service", or the percentage of calls that are answered with 20 seconds, usually in the mid-80s. The system also shows that the average speed of answering is 11 seconds, the number of calls answered (2,556 by 11am on the day I visited) and the number of calls abandoned by customers (32).

Julie Landin, human resource development manager, who's working on winning an Investors In People award for the centre, says: "It's a very busy, challenging environment. The staff are never bored. It's an exciting atmosphere to work in."