ow they establish patterns to either conform or deviate from the intentions of the designers (Russell, 2007). This aspect is outside the scope of this
dissertation. Technology can therefore be regarded as a solution that bridges the sales and marketing functions to improve targeting efforts. In other cases, it can be viewed as a tool that is specifically for a one-to one customer interaction which is regarded as the sole responsibility of the sales/service; call centres or marketing departments (Peppers, 2000). But on the overall, it should neither be regarded as just a mere technology nor application but rather a cross-functional , customer-driven, technology-integration business process management
strategy that aims at increasing and maximising relationships which also encompasses the entire organisation. This is often referred to as Customer Relation Management (CRM) (Goldenberg, 2000). Literature has shown that CRM is based on the interaction of:
People: this refers to the people working with the system and are regarded as the building block for customer relationship,
Business process: this defines the overall business goal of the organisation
Technology: this is an enabler for achieving remarkable improvement in the performance of the organisation (Chen and Popovich, 2003).
These interactions are represented in the diagram below Diagram 2.1 The CRM Model (Chen and Popovich, 2003).
CALL CENTRE AND MANAGEMENT
In general, academic literatures on call centre have focused on employment, relationship and the labour process. A significant number of these literatures have focused largely on managerial perspective in terms of operations and performance. Call centres are people intensive operations and the management of the frontline employees otherwise referred to as the call agents has been identified as one of the biggest challenges for call centre managers (Houlihan, 2002). Call centres potentially contribute to customer satisfaction and retention but most organizations still fail to exploit full strategic value out of their call centre operations (Mahesh and kasturi, 2006). Traditionally service management models recommend that Organisations focus on three areas which include:
Defining a service strategy
Ensuring the service delivery systems are user friendly
Managing for customer- oriented people especially on the frontline (Gilson and khandelwal, 2005).
These models further argue that it is important for the components - strategy, operations and people are all compatible but most literature show an indication of incompatibility.
CHALLENGES OF MANAGERS/SUPERVISORS IN A CALL CENTRE
Managers are faced with a number of challenges of which the most common and prevalent ones include:
The conflict of quality versus quantity: In call centres, this conflict is at the core of many other related problems (Frenkel et al, 1998; Callaghan and Thompson 2002 & dean, 2002). Measurement of both quantity and quality in most cases is based on performance. Research has shown that although management values quality, they tend to focus more on measurement and statistics which is as a result of the large amount of information provided to them. Information provided to them such as the number of calls per agent; the percentage of calls answered within a specified time frame; the average speed calls are answered, hence the shift of atte
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