A call center located in a typical service encounter of a firm plays a key role in maintaining customer satisfaction and customer loyalty by resolving a variety of problems from the encounter. An outstanding performance of customer relationship manage...
A call center located in a typical service encounter of a firm plays a key role in maintaining customer satisfaction and customer loyalty by resolving a variety of problems from the encounter. An outstanding performance of customer relationship management (CRM) at a call center enables a firm to obtain the differential advantages over competitors. However, CEOs still see a call center not a profit earner, but a budget consuming department. Therefore, they focus on reducing the operating costs of a call center. In an effort to reduce the costs, they run a call center by outsourcing instead of running an internal department, In line with this perspective, customer service representatives (CSRs) are recognized as not an employer of the company but an object belonging to an outsourcing agency. Nowadays, this perspective brings about many problems to a call center. The typical problems are that CSRs suffer from low payment and recognition despite of their high emotional labor, high rates of turnover, and low organizational commitment, which ultimately leads to an increase of operating costs due to frequent employment and training.
Under theses circumstances, the study suggests the need for the company's change in the management of CSRs. The ability of CSRs makes an effect on dealing with their task at the call center, which can influence the perceived service quality of customers. Base on this understanding, firstly this study aims at examining the emotional intelligence as the most essential ability for the CSRs in conducting their task and devloping their career in the call center. The emotional intelligence is a variable that attracts recently as the most essential ability to CSRs. This refers to the emotional ability to understand the emotion of customers, and to control and manage their own emotion. The CSRs with high emotional intelligence can adjust their emotion effectively and be successful at the call center where they are to meet numerous customers. Secondly, this study tries to empirically test the effects of representatives' emotional intelligence on two types of organizational commitment i.e. affective commitment and calculative commitment. It can be an critical issue to improve organizational commitment of CSRs at the call center as CSRs' turnover is very frequent. Organizational commitment is expected to help CSRs to have affection and a sense of belonging, and furthermore to remain and develop at the call center. Finally, this study tries to verify the effects of organizational commitment on prosocial customer service behavior, turnover intention, and service quality.
The data are collected from 10 call center representatives of communication, retail, finance, insurance and public institutions, and finally 288 data are used for analysis. The results are as follows. Firstly, this study evaluated the emotional intelligence of CSRs by using the SREIS Scale (Self-Report EL Scale) suggested by Schutte et al.(1998) designed for evaluating the emotional intelligence. We verified the four dimensions of emotional intelligence including emotion regulation ability, emotion appraisal ability, emotion utilization ability, emotion sharing ability. The result has proven that the emotional intelligence is closely related with affective commitment and calculative commitment.
Secondly, regarding the relationships between organizational commitment and prococial service behaviors - role-prescribed customer service and cooperation, it has been proven that only affective commitment is meaningful to role-prescribed customer service and cooperation, but calculative commitment is not. These results indicate that CSRs with high emotional affection has a sense of belonging at the call center, and the CSRs increase their efforts to perform the task well, and voluntarily help their colleagues. On the other hand, when CSRs have an intention to leave but to stay by any specific reason, this study also suggests that it can be hardly possible to expect any voluntary actions from the CSRs.
Thirdly, this result has shown that organizational commitment of CSRs is closely related to intention of turnover and organizational effectiveness of service quality. In particular, the affective commitment of CSRs is the most effective variable to reduce turnover intention, and it contributes to service quality improvement. On the other hand, the calculative commitment increases the intention of turnover while it has no effect on service quality. This result argues that if CSRs stay not by a sense of belonging or affection but by a force or any circumstantial factors, it may lead to a turnover.
Finally, CSRs' prosocial customer service activities are not related to the intention of turnover, but they contribute to service quality improvement. This result demonstrates that the voluntary activity of CSRs is the key factor to improve customer service quality.