Superior Customer Experience In Voice-to-Voice Encounters: Insights From Three Studies Regarding Interaction And Call Center Management

The call center industry has been steadily growing in terms of economic scope and workforce. Additionally, they have become of utmost importance to customer relationship management (CRM). Thus, call centers often represent an essential and pivotal customer touch point with increasing strategic importance for a company. As a result, superior customer experience in voice-to-voice encounters is a key success factor of CRM and a key differentiating factor for companies. However, research focusing on customers' quality perceptions of call center services is limited. Consequently, this thesis is designed to address specific aspects of voice-to-voice encounters in order to successfully manage them.The three studies of this thesis all analyze customers' perceptions and evaluations of voice-to-voice interactions, including those involving call centers. Whereas the first two studies focus on the high-touch factor within call centers (i.e., the interpersonal interaction between customers and call center employees), the third article addresses the high-tech factor (i.e., the human-machine interaction), which is gaining more and more importance and, in some cases, is even replacing interpersonal interactions. More precisely, this thesis focuses on the following questions: What impact does a call center agent's voice and vocal expressions have on customers' perceptions, and how can agents be trained to positively influence customers' quality evaluations and customer satisfaction? Does a foreign accent matter in call center interactions, and what implications can be derived to improve call center management? What influences customers' quality evaluations of automated voice-to-voice encounters (e.g., through interactive voice response (IVR)), and how can these telephone-based self-services be optimized? By providing insights into these topics, all three studies are highly relevant for call center research and management and provide information that can also be transferred to other areas.