Almost everyone has dialed a simple phone number -- be it to order a pair of socks or reserve a flight to New York -- only to end up navigating through a seemingly endless labyrinth of options, all because a mechanical voice continually instructs the caller to "Press 1 now."

Aggravating? Yes. But call centers, with their attendant voice response units, need not be frustrating. When a company manages its call center well, effectively linking a triad of service, information technology, and internal processes, both the customer and the company can benefit.

That's especially true in the financial services industry, where call centers have moved beyond their most obvious function -- as low-cost channels for resolving a myriad of customer concerns -- to become a powerful means of service delivery with the potential to generate substantial revenue.

HBS assistant professor Frances X. Frei and two colleagues, Ann Evenson and Patrick T. Harker, both of Wharton, have written a working paper on this subject titled "Effective Call Center Management: Evidence from Financial Services." The authors go beyond earlier research to look at the broad context of call center service delivery. Noting that recent literature has discussed "various ways to steer customer interactions to sale opportunities," the authors assert that the topic of effective service delivery has almost entirely been overlooked. "Before being able to generate revenue through the call center," the authors write, "institutions have to fully understand and be able to implement superior customer service.

"Each service interaction forms the basis of a consumer's perceptions of the overall quality of an organization," the authors continue. "How well a business is able to manage and implement the service delivery process has a direct effect on retention of existing clients and can have a significant impact on acquiring new business. The result is that satisfaction is based on how well an institution meets and exceeds a customer's expectations in every interaction."

In research focused on eleven major financial services institutions, Frei, Evenson, and Harker created a model demonstrating precise links between three main elements (or "drivers") of superior service delivery: effective people, effective internal processes, and effective information technology. The word "effective" is emphasized, they say, "to clearly make the point that individual elements of this mix may be better or worse across different institutions. Making them work together effectively is the key to developing world-class service delivery."

The results of their research not only illustrate the relationships between the elements but also highlight various factors within each element (for example, how one information technology practice may affect another) and how each element relates to overall service delivery.

This article originally appeared on the HBS Working Knowledge portal

Post a Comment