Author(s)

Zillah Nkonde¹, Jackson Phiri²

¹Graduate School of Business, University of Zambia, Lusaka, Zambia.
²Department of Computer Science, School of Natural Sciences, University of Zambia, Lusaka, Zambia.

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.

Call Centre, In House, Offshore, Outsource, Service, Customer Service, Customer Satisfaction

Nkonde, Z. and Phiri, J. (2020) An Assessment of Outsourcing of Offshore Call Centres on Customer Service in Commercial Banks: A Case of Zambia. Open Journal of Social Sciences, 8, 296-310. doi: 10.4236/jss.2020.82023.