			Home About us Contact

Customer Services (customer + services)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	50%

Selected Abstracts

Virtual Servants: Stereotyping Female Front-Office Employees on the Internet

GENDER, WORK & ORGANISATION, Issue 5 2005
Eva Gustavsson
This article focuses on the service providers of the future: virtual assistants on the Internet. Recent technological developments, supported by intensive research on artificial intelligence, have enabled corporations to construct ,virtual employees' who can interact with their online customers. The number of virtual assistants on the Internet continues to grow and most of these new service providers are human-like and female. In this article I profile virtual employees on the Internet , who they are, what they do and how they present themselves. I demonstrate that the Internet suffers from the same gender stereotyping characteristic of customer services in general and that the unreflective choice of female images is, at the minimum, a symbolic reinforcement of the real circumstances of gender divisions in customer service. [source]

Smoking cessation advice provided in 53 Norwegian pharmacies

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHARMACY PRACTICE, Issue 4 2004
Dr. Anne G. Granas Director of research
Objective To investigate the quality of the smoking cessation advice on over-the-counter (OTC) nicotine replacement treatment (NRT) provided by community and hospital pharmacies in Norway and to assess any change in customer services and pharmaceutical smoking cessation advice after a change in legislation deregulating NRT from pharmacy-only to general sale. Method A mystery shopper made 106 visits to 53 pharmacies in Oslo, Norway. The first visit was when NRT was a pharmacy-only medicine and the second when it had become available from any outlet as a general sales product. The pharmacies were scored on 12 observation parameters regarding customer service and pharmaceutical advice (score 0,4, total possible score was 48). Key findings There was considerable inter- and intra-pharmacy variation in scores. The pharmacies' total score ranged from 3 to 45. On only 14.2% of the visits was the service categorised as ,Good'. There was no statistically significant difference in total score between the two test periods (P = 0.56), and hence no measurable difference in customer services and pharmaceutical advice as a result of increased competition after the switch to general sale. A scatter plot showed no relationship between the individual pharmacies' total score at the two visits. Conclusions Pharmacies' scores for the quality of their smoking cessation advice were generally low. There was no measurable change in pharmacies' customer service and pharmaceutical advice following the deregulation of NRT. There was little consistency in the total score between the first and the second visit to the same pharmacy. Improvement is needed in the smoking cessation advice provided by Norwegian pharmacies. [source]

How buyers frame problems: Revisited

PSYCHOLOGY & MARKETING, Issue 6 2001
Elizabeth J. Wilson
This article investigates the following propositions: a useful approach for building an organizational-buying,behavior taxonomy might begin with classifying how buyers frame purchasing problems followed by how such frames affect subsequent perceptions and actions in the decision process. Unlike previous taxonomies of buying situations, direct questioning of organizational buyers is used to learn: (1) whether or not they identify different categories of buying problems; (2) if they do, what dimensions they use when framing buying problems; and (3) how do such frames influence their choices of value-added service alternatives offered by suppliers. To test the propositions empirically, supplier choices are modeled with the use of buying-decision exercises. A key result of this study is that the buyers' framing of problems affects their preferences for vendor designs of value-added customer services. Most likely, the framing of buying problems by organizational buyers is layered and more complex than related taxonomies found in the marketing literature. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. [source]

Are You in This Country?

ANTIPODE, Issue 2 2010
How "Local" Social Relations Can Limit the "Globalisation" of Customer Services Supply Chains
Abstract:, The relocation of thousands of call centre and back office jobs from the UK to subcontractors in India in the early 2000s led to extensive speculation that the "globalisation" and "jobs flight" of service work was underway. Yet as this article illustrates some call centre customer services do not easily transfer to different local, social and cultural contexts. Call centre operations are embedded in local social relations and taken for granted skills that are difficult to reproduce outside of the locality which has produced them. Nevertheless the spatial dispersal of work can be as much a political process as it is an economic one. This article, which follows the journey of 1000 call centre jobs from the UK to India, illuminates how subcontracting service work "offshore" can facilitate a transformation of the employment relation and an escape from a difficult to discipline labour force. [source]