Customer Service Representatives

This article investigates sex work among Black transgender women in Chicago’s ballroom scene, drawing on ethnographic data to argue that Black transwomen engage in sex work as a practice of self-investment undergirded by an epistemological shift regarding the centrality of affective labor to their work. In so doing, interlocutors reap the benefits of deploying embodied knowledge—the harnessing and transformation of insight derived from lived experiences of racial, gender, and sexual subjection into useful strategies, tactics, and tools—to secure material and human resources necessary for survival. A focus on how Black transwomen live, despite continued physical, spiritual, socioeconomic, political, and cultural annihilation, remains critically important given the myriad indicators (low average life expectancy, low annual income, disproportionally high murder rate, etc.) that expose the world’s indifference to the plight of this community and Black bodies writ large. Further, the author places interlocutors in conversation with Black feminist historians’ and theorists’ discussions of sex work among Black women to expose points of convergence between Black cis- and transgender women. The author also complicates narratives that link sex work to “survival” and subsequently obfuscate explorations of limited and situated agency among Black women that have significant historical precedent.

How customer service representatives lose control of the call

The contact centre industry has been growing rapidly in the Philippines over the last two decades and now boasts over one million customer service representatives (CSRs). Outsourcing work to this destination, where English may not be the first language, can lead to communication difficulties. Problems of locally recruited CSRs ‘losing control of the call’, leading to customer frustration and poor feedback, have previously been attributed to poor grammar and incomprehensible accents. However, more recent research has suggested that such communicative problems actually stem from a more general inability to build relationships and appropriately select, explain and describe information about the product or service and, if needed, instruct the client on what to do. This paper therefore examines ‘losing control of a call’ in terms of the overall exchange. Specifically, two calls were examined to analyse how information was organised, packaged and developed to the satisfaction (or not) of the client. We argue that discrete grammatical inaccuracies and regional accents do not result in losing control as much as the way overall meaning is managed by the CSR. The implications of these initial findings could be of importance to the recruitment, training, coaching and appraisal of CSRs in an industry where the nature of communication breakdown remains poorly understood.

Emotional Intelligence Mitigates the Effects of Customer Incivility on Surface Acting and Exhaustion in Service Occupations: A Moderated Mediation Model

This study contributes to the constantly accumulating evidence on the effects of customer incivility (CI) on service employee exhaustion. Previous research has demonstrated that surface acting (SA) acts as a mediating variable in the relationship between CI and exhaustion. This study extended prior findings in two ways. The results of Study 1 (315 retail sales employees, 62.2% female) demonstrated that SA mediates the positive relationship between CI and exhaustion while controlling for employees’ trait positive and negative affectivity (NA). The results of Study 2 (292 customer service representatives, 51% female) supported a moderated mediation model demonstrating that trait emotional intelligence (EI) buffers the direct and indirect (through SA) effects of CI on exhaustion. Specifically, it was found that employees exposed to many uncivil customer behaviors but high in trait EI reported using less SA and, thus, experienced fewer exhaustion symptoms than their low in trait EI counterparts. These results highlight EI as an important personal resource that mitigates the adverse effects of CI on service employees’ exhaustion, and suggest that organizations should consider implementing EI training programmes for their frontline service employees.

The Relationship Between Criminal Records and Job Performance: An Examination of Customer Service Representatives

Between 70 million and 100 million Americans—or as many as one in three—have some type of criminal record (Vallas & Dietrich, 2014). Having even a minor criminal record often functions as a significant impediment to gainful employment and resultant economic security. This is especially problematic given that: (a) many companies now incorporate background checks within their hiring process and (b) little empirical research exists about the relationship between criminal records and job performance. Thus, this study examined the relationship between criminal records and objective performance of customer service representatives (N = 627) in a large telecommunications firm. Our regression analyses indicate that criminal record was not a predictor of job performance.

Analyzing Call Data Through Live Calls Using Sphinx Tool

For Improving the Business growth, the Business people try to know the customer's intension about their products. One of the best methods of collecting customer's feedback is telephone or mobile survey where customer service representatives(CSR) can interact with customers through phone calls and also record to analyze the customer's call data. The main issue of call data analysis through recorded files is a large amount of storage is required to store the audio files. This results increased costs, maintaining the hardware and software systems and manage a database system. In this paper we can directly convert the live calls into text files using speech to text (STT) algorithm and analyze these text files using Hadoop and MapReduce Framework for improving their future purchasing behavior.

(I'm) Happy to Help (You): The Impact of Personal Pronoun Use in Customer–Firm Interactions

In responding to customer questions or complaints, should marketing agents linguistically “put the customer first” by using certain personal pronouns? Customer orientation theory, managerial literature, and surveys of managers, customer service representatives, and consumers suggest that firm agents should emphasize how “we” (the firm) serve “you” (the customer), while de-emphasizing “I” (the agent) in these customer–firm interactions. The authors find evidence of this language pattern in use at over 40 firms. However, they theorize and demonstrate that these personal pronoun emphases are often suboptimal. Five studies using lab experiments and field data reveal that firm agents who refer to themselves using “I” rather than “we” pronouns increase customers’ perceptions that the agent feels and acts on their behalf. In turn, these positive perceptions of empathy and agency lead to increased customer satisfaction, purchase intentions, and purchase behavior. Furthermore, the authors find that customer-referencing “you” pronouns have little impact on these outcomes and can sometimes have negative consequences. These findings enhance understanding of how, when, and why language use affects social perception and behavior and provide valuable insights for marketers.