Customers Suffer From Employee Churn: High Turnover Makes It Harder to Provide Top Service

Key Findings: • As rates of voluntary turnover climb within key business units, customers are more likely to report bad customer service. • When new workers arrive, established workers have to take time away from customer service to train the new workers in procedures and company culture. • Work units with lots of new employees have more trouble managing turnover and receive the lowest customer service ratings. • Bigger may not be better—larger work units have particular difficulty managing turnover and receive lower customer service scores than smaller ones. • A tight, cohesive work group seems to suffer from turnover as much as a less-bonded group

Service Organizations: work schedule as a stress factor of worker's labour

Представлено исследование специфики профессионального стресса у сотрудников контакт-центров. Описан целостный синдром стресса у данной категории специалистов. Выдвигается предположение, что график работы сотрудника оказывает влияние на особенности проявлений стресса и его устойчивые негативные последствия. Доказана повышенная напряженность трудовой деятельности персонала, график работы которого включает ночные смены.The paper is devoted to the research of call center agent’s stress. The complete stress syndrome of staff is described. The assumption is that the stress syndrome and its stable negative consequences depend on the work schedule. It is proved that thee night shift is more stressful than the day shift.Программа развития УрФУ на 2013 год (п.2.1.1.1

Aesthetic labour, emotional labour and masculinity

This special issue of the journal focuses on the topic of service work and gender. The theme for this special issue arose out of a stream on service work and gender at the 2005 Gender Work and Organization conference. In many respects this special edition can be considered as complementary to an earlier special edition on gender and service work that came out in 2005. In the editorial for the 2005 special edition Kerfoot and Korczynski raised a number of issues, questions and points for debate. It is worth briefly reprising some of these here as in many respects they provide a point of departure for a number of the concerns of this particular special edition

Addressing Domestic Violence as a Barrier to Work: Building Collaborations between Domestic Violence Service Providers and Employment Services Agencies

The Kraft Domestic Violence Services Project began in October 2000 and continued through the end of 2002 at sites in Houston, Chicago, and Seattle. This national demonstration project investigated how domestic violence acts as a barrier to women's training and employment and the interventions that are effective for assisting women remain safe and employed. The Center for Impact Research (CIR) undertook the project's research component and provided technical assistance to the participating employment services agencies and domestic violence service providers. From its inception, this project was designed not only to provide direct services and build the capacity of participating agencies, but also to include a research component for documenting and sharing program and participant outcomes. Thus, the purposes of the project were twofold: * To develop a collaborative model of providing domestic violence services within a job-training environment to expand access to domestic violence services for low-income victims. * To develop a model for strengthening programs that assist low-income women attain economic self sufficiency by addressing needs of domestic violence survivors. This report summarizes the project learnings and best practice recommendations for integrating domestic violence services into employment services agencies. It discusses establishing and maintaining interagency collaborations, training of case managers, conducting screening and referrals, and ongoing delivery of domestic violence services within the employment services setting

Controlling service work: An ambiguous accomplishment between employees, management and customers

In order to understand the control of service work, most service literature has focused on its production while treating the customer as secondary. The consumption literature emphasizes the customer’s role but lacks empirical evidence for its claims. Using an ethnographic study of an ‘exclusive’ department store, this article aims to reduce the gap between these two bodies of literature by investigating how employees, management and customers control service work. The findings suggest that the maintenance of class difference combined with competing expectations of managers, employees and customers makes the management of service work highly ambiguous and reveals a continuing instability between managerial practices of control and consumer culture

A Case Study for Business Integration as a Service

This paper presents Business Integration as a Service (BIaaS) to allow two services to work together in the Cloud to achieve a streamline process. We illustrate this integration using two services; Return on Investment (ROI) Measurement as a Service (RMaaS) and Risk Analysis as a Service (RAaaS) in the case study at the University of Southampton. The case study demonstrates the cost-savings and the risk analysis achieved, so two services can work as a single service. Advanced techniques are used to demonstrate statistical services and 3D Visualisation services under the remit of RMaaS and Monte Carlo Simulation as a Service behind the design of RAaaS. Computational results are presented with their implications discussed. Different types of risks associated with Cloud adoption can be calculated easily, rapidly and accurately with the use of BIaaS. This case study confirms the benefits of BIaaS adoption, including cost reduction and improvements in efficiency and risk analysis. Implementation of BIaaS in other organisations is also discussed. Important data arising from the integration of RMaaS and RAaaS are useful for management and stakeholders of University of Southampton

On Optimal Service Differentiation in Congested Network Markets

As Internet applications have become more diverse in recent years, users having heavy demand for online video services are more willing to pay higher prices for better services than light users that mainly use e-mails and instant messages. This encourages the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to explore service differentiations so as to optimize their profits and allocation of network resources. Much prior work has focused on the viability of network service differentiation by comparing with the case of a single-class service. However, the optimal service differentiation for an ISP subject to resource constraints has remained unsolved. In this work, we establish an optimal control framework to derive the analytical solution to an ISP's optimal service differentiation, i.e. the optimal service qualities and associated prices. By analyzing the structures of the solution, we reveal how an ISP should adjust the service qualities and prices in order to meet varying capacity constraints and users' characteristics. We also obtain the conditions under which ISPs have strong incentives to implement service differentiation and whether regulators should encourage such practices

The Battle Oaks: Preserving a Living Legend

Values at Work Series: Facilities Services developed our core values of Service, Integrity, Teamwork, Excellence, and Stewardship (collectively referred to as SITES) based on the way we approach our work. Our values can be found throughout our areas of services in many ways.Through a series of articles, the Values at Work Series is devoted to providing a closer look at how our values are hard at work. Each article focuses on an area of service and how that group incorporates our values in a significant way. We are proud of our employees who continue to serve as an example of “walking the talk” every day.The Battle Oaks are among The University of Texas at Austin’s oldest living trees on campus at upwards of 250-300 years old. These three Texas live oaks graced the grounds of the original Forty Acres when the university opened in September 1883.Facilities Service

The Intentional Use of Service Recovery Strategies to Influence Consumer Emotion, Cognition and Behaviour

Service recovery strategies have been identified as a critical factor in the success of. service organizations. This study develops a conceptual frame work to investigate how specific service recovery strategies influence the emotional, cognitive and negative behavioural responses of . consumers., as well as how emotion and cognition influence negative behavior. Understanding the impact of specific service recovery strategies will allow service providers' to more deliberately and intentionally engage in strategies that result in positive organizational outcomes. This study was conducted using a 2 x 2 between-subjects quasi-experimental design. The results suggest that service recovery has a significant impact on emotion, cognition and negative behavior. Similarly, satisfaction, negative emotion and positive emotion all influence negative behavior but distributive justice has no effect