TITLE:
An Assessment of Outsourcing of Offshore Call Centres on Customer Service in Commercial Banks: A Case of Zambia
AUTHORS:
Zillah Nkonde, Jackson Phiri
KEYWORDS:
Call Centre, In House, Offshore, Outsource, Service, Customer Service, Customer Satisfaction
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.8 No.2,
February
28,
2020
ABSTRACT: Call
Centres can be considered as important channels of communication in an
organisation as they are the first point of integration between call centre
agents that represent the business and customers. Therefore, it is key that
agents should be correctly sizing the opportunity of any given call, because a
Call Centre can bring benefits not only in terms of improved customer service
through efficiency, but also in terms of increasing market share through
effectiveness. This paper sorts to assess outsourcing of offshore call centres on
customer service as most studies have not yet examined impact of offshore call
centres on customer service in Zambian commercial banks. In order to address
this gap, this study explores the different types of call centres, challenges
faced and discuss what would help the organisations grow in market share and at
the same time deliver excellent customer service.The
study was based on 125 commercial bank customers. Purposive sampling was used in the study.
Descriptive statistics and correlation were used to analyse the data. The results show that the call centre is a very
important aspect of customer relations as all the customers sampled indicated
that they utilise the call centre line for various services ranging from
balance inquiries, account transactions, internet banking services, mobile
banking services as well as other inquiries. Following the various challenges
experienced by customers as shown in the results, it is therefore concluded and
recommended that creating local call centres in Zambia would help so much in
alleviating these challenges and improve customer experience.