In a rapidly changing business-environment, companies operate a lot of call centers as the customer service counter to satisfy customers’ various requirements because it is crucially important for the companies to identify customers’ needs quickly...
In a rapidly changing business-environment, companies operate a lot of call centers as the customer service counter to satisfy customers’ various requirements because it is crucially important for the companies to identify customers’ needs quickly and continue to maintain relationships with customers which is the basis of business survival.
Previous call center is recognized as the simple place to give and answer the customers’ phone calls for the purpose of customer service, telemarketing, and technical support, but under the changing recognition of the recent call center from the place to handle customer inquiries to the revenue-creating department, the importance of the call center has emerged as the core of the company's successful customer-relationship management.
Information systems, providing the company's managers with rational decision-making sources, can be regarded as ‘integrated management information systems’ when the various materials are given to the company’s decision makers as the converted information which is essential for the efficient operation of the company.
Initial enterprise information systems are limited to production facilities or simple clerical works, but with the development of information technology, enterprise information systems are activated with the company as the one complete system. Thus, the role of the enterprise information systems is good enough to be recognized as business activity itself because both of them are closely correlated.
We cannot emphasize the role of the agent too much at the call center, a complex social technical system. Considering the absolute role of agent at the call center information system, it is highly recommended to give the agent as many benefits as possible, which will increase the agent’s job satisfaction and self-esteem, decisive
elements to improve positive results of satisfying customers’ needs.
Thus, when the crucial role of the agent in communicating with the customer is acknowledged well enough to relieve the agent’s stress, it will lead to the decrease of the agent’s emotional labor and the improvement of the business organization’s performance simultaneously.
However, the research on the relationship between information system and the emotional labor has been scarcely conducted even though the importance of the emotional labor is actively researched and discussed these days. Based on the big influence toward the customer-friendly attitude and job satisfaction caused by the
relationship between the call center information system and the emotional labor, much effort has been put in this study to find out the answers to the following research questions:
(1) How can the quality of airline call center affect the degree of user satisfaction? To find out the answer, DeLone and Mclean’s (1992, 2002) success factors of information systems, information quality and system quality were investigated in DeLone and Mclean’s information system success model(IS Success Model). Additionally, Goodhue and Thompson’s (1995) task-technology fit model which affects users in the internal service quality and involuntary environment was also
researched. (2) Does the quality of the airline call center information systems meet our expectation toward the difference between before and after agent’s use? (3) How can the sense of meeting the expectations and the self-efficacy affect the performance of the emotional labor? (4) How can all these elements mentioned above
affect customer-friendly attitude and job satisfaction when they are closely related to the performance of the call center agent’s emotional labor? This survey was conducted by way of distributing questionnaires directly to the call center agents who operated common airline reservation system TOPAS, ABACUS, GALILEO, WORLDSPAN from October 1st, 2013 to October 21st, 2013. The implications of this study can be summarized as following:
First, this research presented practical guidelines to the organization's decision-makers related to the airline call center operations in order to introduce and expand successful call center information system. Second, this research suggested the possible method to inspect and diagnose the system by way of applying the measurement model mentioned in this research into the airline information system and analyzing it. Third, the performance-measuring model developed in
order to measure the performance of the airline call center information system can also be used when we carry out the performance-measuring task in the similar information system as the basis of diagnosing the situation and presenting the driving directions.
Fourth, the performance of emotional labor can maximize the organization's performance as the mediating element between the quality of the information system and the degree of the organization’s satisfaction. Finally, this research presented the complete strategic perspective in order to measure the performance of the call center information system by way of analyzing the causal relationship between the theoretical airline call center information system and the measurement model.