Fairness Approach
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Organizations place great emphasis on establishing effective communication with customers to gauge the quality of their service offerings, maximize customer satisfaction, and improve customer service. The value placed on these service encounters has resulted in an increasing number of call centers with representatives who regularly communicate with the customer.
These representatives are responsible for providing 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 to achieve due to items beyond the representative's control (i.e., 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 continually look to monitor and measure the challenges encountered and separate the performance of representatives from the broader assessment of call center operations.
FMG Approach
To this end, Fors Marsh Group has refined a Fairness Approach to assessing customer reactions to service encounters. According to this approach, which is grounded in equity theory[1], customers view service encounters as exchanges with service providers and evaluate the fairness of these interactions. This evaluation is a key driver to customer satisfaction and involves the following dimensions:
- Outcome Fairness – did the customer get what he or she wanted
- Procedural Fairness – the rules and procedures used to determine the outcome
- Interactional Fairness – the quality of the communication
To track the different components of satisfaction, FMG supplements traditional balanced scorecard measures with examination of these fairness dimensions. The idea of fairness theory is that negative events trigger a sense-making process in which people attempt to interpret why they were treated "unfairly." During this sense-making process, people review the information surrounding the negative event such as how they were treated and what procedures were used by the organization[2]. People seek to determine how much they are personally responsible for the outcomes of the interaction and they also seek to determine how much the service provider is responsible for their outcomes.
One determinant of people's attributions of responsibility for their outcomes is information about the service provider’s procedural and interactional fairness. The more the customer service representative is perceived to be procedurally and interactionally unfair, the more likely customers are to see the provider as responsible for their outcomes.
Fair procedures often include such things as:
- Control over the process (or voice in the process)
- Perceived consistency
- Bias suppression
- The accuracy of information
- The existence of provisions for correcting bad decisions
- Conformity with personal standards of ethics and morality
In addition, fair interactions are defined by treatment that is perceived as respectful, courteous, and professional as well as knowledgeable and responsive.
As shown in the figure below, the construct of fairness has been found to significantly influence perceptions of overall satisfaction[3]. In the face of unmet expectations (low outcome fairness), perceptions of procedural and interactional fairness have been found to buffer the resulting feelings of dissatisfaction. Additionally, measuring these different dimensions of fairness allows for better tracking of satisfaction on both highly controllable dimensions (e.g., interactional fairness and procedural fairness) and those that are less controllable (e.g., outcome fairness).
The Interaction of Procedural and Outcome Fairness with Satisfaction
Additionally, measuring these different dimensions of fairness allows for better tracking of satisfaction on both highly controllable dimensions (e.g., provided clear answers, accurately explained policies) and those that are less controllable (e.g., legislative policies, expectations). Using this behavioral theory–driven approach has allowed Fors Marsh Group clients to understand the underlying drivers of satisfaction, disentangle performance of an organization versus that of the service provider, and identify key strategies for improving results.
[1]Adams, J. S. (1963). Toward an understanding of inequity. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 67, 422–436. [2]Brockner, J. & Wiesenfeld, B.M. (1996). An integrative framework for explaining reactions to a decision: The interactive effects of outcomes and procedures. Psychological Bulletin, 120, 189-208. [3]Viera, L., Griepentrog, B., & Marsh, S. (2010). When good service is fair service in a call center. In T. Shapiro (Chair) and D. Bowen (Discussant), Service Behaviors and Customer Reactions: Justice, Satisfaction and Loyalty. Paper presented at the 25th Conference of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Atlanta, GA.