Effective Call Center Management: Evidence from Financial Services

Call centers are quickly becoming the major point of contact for serving customers and generating new revenue in a variety of industries. No where is this growth in the importance of call centers more apparent than in the financial services industry. This paper presents the results of a survey of the management of call center operations at major financial service firms. The results clearly indicate the importance of human resource management practices and technology in creating high-performance call center environments.

Leeway for the loyal: a model of employee discretion

This article examines the factors underlying task discretion from an economist's perspective. It argues that the key axis for understanding discretion is the trade-off between the positive effects of discretion on potential output per employee and the negative effects of greater leeway on work effort. In empirical analysis using matched employer-employee data, it is shown that discretion is strongly affected by the level of employee commitment. In addition, discretion is generally greater in high-skilled jobs, although not without exceptions, and lower where employees are under-skilled. Homeworking and flexitime policies raise employee discretion. The impact of teamworking is mixed. In about half of cases team members do not jointly decide about work matters, and the net effect of teams on task discretion in these cases is negative. In other cases, where team members do decide matters jointly, the impact is found to be neutral according to employees' perceptions, or positive according to managers' perceptions. There are also significant and substantial unobserved establishment-level factors which affect task discretion

The effects of organizational structure on employee trust and job satisfaction

Includes bibliographical references

The Role of Emotional Relational Behaviors on Interpersonal Consumer Service Loyalty

This study seeks to examine factors that enhance the development of interpersonal service relationships between consumers and service employees. It focuses on interpersonal service relationships that are extended in duration, affective or emotionally charged, and intimate in distance (EAI), or those which appear to be boundary open (Price and Arnould 1999 Price et al. 1995a, 1995b). It thus emphasizes relationships that are similar to personal acquaintances and friendships, rather than ones that are non-affective, and consist of little or no emotional content, such as professional relationships and casual acquaintances (Johnson and Selnes 2004 Coulter and Ligas 2004). Based on a review of the literature, five factors, namely, mutual understanding, personalization, authenticity, problem-solving behavior, and specialized treatment, are combined to form a parsimonious group of relational behaviors (RBs) that are expected to promote friendship-like relationships. A conceptual model is portrayed that shows interrelationships between the relational behaviors and relationship outcomes, including service quality, satisfaction, emotional trust, and loyalty (Sirdeshmukh et al. 2002). In order to collect data, this study utilizes a self-report survey and cross-sectional design, within the context of hair care service. Additionally, web-based survey and sampling are utilized. The sample consists of individuals who are members of a professional business organization, whose occupation requires a professional appearance. Thus, they are expected to patronize hair care services. The final study consists of 191 usable surveys primarily from African-American females (65.4 African-American, 80.6 female), who have unique hair care needs. The sample is thus homogeneous with respect to various salon behaviors and demographics. Using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and AMOS software, scales are assessed for unidimensionality, reliability, and validity. Results show, however, that this measurement model is not theoretically supp