An empirical study on customer interaction with a contact centre and its effect on CRM: a multicultural perspective from India

Contact centres, or call centres as they are known popularly, are used by service providers to solve customers’ problems and enhance their value. These interactions are reflective of the service providers’ commitment to keeping their customers satisfied and happy, and point to areas of improvement for service providers, and also tell them how customers perceive their communication strategies. In this paper, the authors have attempted to study the levels of satisfaction of customers in their interactions with call centres, as call centres are the most convenient and regularly used mode of getting in touch with a service provider. The authors also point to gaps in customer interaction strategies that could have an impact on customer satisfaction and the influence these gaps could have on the company’s overall Customer Relationship Management strategy. They identify four key dimensions of customer relationship, namely interaction, knowledge and information, responsiveness and reliability and map the response of customers with respect to each within the overall framework of satisfaction. This paper also analysis cultural influence of these strategies.