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

and loyalty, which contribute significantly to a company’s revenues and profitability. Yet most
customers are dissatisfied with the way companies resolve their complaints, and most companies
do not take advantage of the learning opportunities afforded by service failures. The authors
provide a research-based approach for helping managers develop a comprehensive service recovery
system. To encourage dissatisfied customers to complain, leading firms set performance
standards, often through the use of guarantees; communicate the importance of recovery to
employees; train customers in how to complain; and use technological support offered through
customer call centers and the internet. in resolving problems, companies need to focus on providing
fair outcomes, procedures, and interactions, Successful companies develop hiring criteria
and training programs that take into account employees’ service-recovery role, develop guidelines
for service recovery, are easily accessible to customers, and use the information in customer
databases to solve problems. Firms promote organizational learning by documenting and classifying
complaints; useful methods include creating internal complaint forms, accessing complaints
made to front-line employees, and categorizing customers who complain. Finally, companies need
to generate additional information on service quality, disseminate it to those responsible for implementing
improvements, and identify those process improvements that will have the greatest
impact on profitability. Customer conflicts are inevitable. A powerful service-recovery strategy
can turn these conflicts into opportunities to improve performance and raise profitability.
Keywords: Customer services, Problems, Organizational learning, Customer satisfaction, Guidelines
19. Aldrich, S.E. Framework for customer contact centers, E-Business Strategies & Solutions, 1999,
55–60.
Abstract. The call center, with its improbable goal of answering and dispatching in seconds,
is no longer the model for customer service, at least not in e-business. Customers have unprecedented
power today, and they are more demanding than ever (their own customers give them
lessons on what to ask for). The new model demands that you help customers via their chosen
medium, at their pace, and on their schedule. The new goal of customer contact centers is to
get the customer’s issue or question resolved to her satisfaction. Where call center managers
once worried about time on hold because of the cost of phone lines, they now worry because
time on hold means poor service. Managers, once measured on minutes to finish a call, are now
measured on time to resolve a customer issue. These new pressures and measurements dictate
a range of technologies and processes in the contact center. This report presents a framework
to describe the elements necessary for contact center excellence and analyzes the parameters for
choosing technologies.
Keywords: Call center, Customer contact center, E-business
20. Chen, E.T. Reengineering a call center using a performance measurement system. Proceedings
of the Fifth Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS 1999). Assoc. Inf. Syst.,
Atlanta, GA, USA; 1999, 668–670.
Abstract. Enhancing customer loyalty and eventually increasing profitability can be facilitated
by the services of a call center, which takes charge of customer service calls and acts as a repository
of marketing information. The most expensive and important resource a call center has is
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