As many organisations are now providing customer service and support via call centres, due to the lower cost of operating, issues addressing the service quality are being raised. Call centres do not exist for the customer to physically interact with, apart from via the telephone, and are in effect virtual organizations. The nature of the service encounter between the call centre and customer is predominantly undertaken using enabling technology; the conventional speech telephone. This suggests the criteria used to assess it may be different from that of a more traditional face-to-face method of service delivery.

Combining the different method of service delivery with the relative youth of the industry has meant that many organizations are still grappling with how to best manage their call centres. For some this involves focussing on how they deliver a quality service to the customer. These issues prompted our investigative research into service quality in a call centre context using the widely applied SERVQUAL model.

Initially the SERVQUAL model was used to analyse the service encounter with a virtual organisation and examine the models applicability in this context. SERVQUAL was then used to examine the way in which a case call centre’s management had tried to deliver a ‘quality call’ to the customer.

Read the full research below.

Warren J S Staples, Prof, John F Dalrymple & Rhonda M Bryar