CALL CENTERS (CENTRES) - Faculty of Industrial Engineering and ...

V Marketing
1. Grig, Rufus. Outbound calling—discredited or misunderstood? Journal of Targeting, Measurement
and Analysis for Marketing, 13 (4), August 2005, 295–298.
Abstract. Telemarketing is an industry that has grown up so quickly—and some might say
irresponsibly—that it could now be facing an early demise. In order to survive, the industry
needs to up its game and behave more responsibly. Most of the problems associated with telemarketing
and other cold calls stems from the technology used to make them. This paper reviews
the technology in use, places it in some historical context, examines the regulatory environment
and finally makes recommendations as to the responsible future use of outbound calling systems.
Business to consumer outbound calling is a laborious process to carry out manually. In order
to improve agent productivity, three technologies have been developed to automate parts of the
process. Achieving an acceptable balance of agent productivity to nuisance call rate is generally
left to the call center manager—although the quality of the predictive pacing algorithm obviously
plays a key part in the performance.
Keywords: Telemarketing, Call centers, Productivity, Salespeople, Automatic call distribution,
Innovations
(Appears also in Section VI.)
2. Gwinner, Kevin P., Mary Jo Bitner, Stephen W. Brown and Ajith Kumar. Service customization
through employee adaptiveness, Journal of Service Research (JSR), 8 (2), 2005, 131–148.
Abstract. Customization strategies aimed at providing customers with individually-tailored
products and services are growing in popularity. In a service context, the responsibility for
customization frequently falls on the shoulders of frontline customer contact employees. Few
marketing scholars, however, have considered what it means to be adaptive in these roles and
how customization behaviors can be encouraged. Drawing on marketing, organizational behavior,
and psychology literatures, the authors define and empirically test antecedents of two
distinct dimensions of employee adaptive behavior: interpersonal adaptive behavior and serviceoffering
adaptive behavior. Results indicate that an employee’s level of customer knowledge,
certain personality predispositions, and intrinsic motivation positively influence the propensity
to adapt both their interpersonal style and the actual service offering. Implications for market
segmentation, employee selection, training, and motivation are offered.
Keywords: Customization, Organizational behavior, Employee attitude, Adaptability, Customer
services, Call centers, Motivation, Studies
(Appears also in Section IV.)
3. Sun, Baohong and Shibo Li. Improving effectiveness of customer service in a cost-efficient
way—with an empirical application to the service allocation decisions with out-sourced centers.
Working paper, Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University, 2005. Available at
Abstract. Ever since the 1990s, the function of call centers has been transformed from dealing
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