- When Good Service is Fair Service

Many organizations place great emphasis on establishing effective communication with their customers in order to gauge the quality of services, maximize customer satisfaction, and recover from service failures. The value placed on these service encounters has resulted in the rapid proliferation of call centers with representatives who regularly interface with the customer. These representatives are tasked with producing high-quality service interactions, which include being readily accessible, demonstrating knowledge and courtesy, and expressing their willingness to help, among many other performance dimensions. This level of performance is often difficult due to items beyond the representative's control (nature of the incoming calls and frequent negative affect, requests beyond their control, existing policies/laws, system limitations, etc).  When faced with these great challenges, it is easy to understand why many representatives face an uphill battle in their service encounters. Therefore, organizations have sought ways to establish metrics that take these challenges into account and attempt to disentangle the performance of representatives from broader assessments of call center operations. To this end, FMG examines the utility of assessing customer reactions to call center service encounters from an equity theory perspective. According to this approach, caller's view service encounters as exchanges with service providers and tend to evaluate the fairness of these interactions. This evaluation involves: 

 1) Outcome Fairness (did the customer get what they wanted) 

 2) Procedural Fairness (the rules and procedures used to determine the outcome)

 3) Interactional Fairness (the quality of the communication)

Back to list

Next