Avinandan Mukherjee

Role of Electronic Trust in Online Retailing: A Re-examination of the Commitment-Trust Theory

Purpose: Trust and commitment are the central tenets in building successful long-term relationships in the online retailing context. In the absence of physical interaction between the buyer and the seller, how websites can gain the trust of the buyers and deliver on the promises made have become central issues in online customer relationship management. This paper aims to re-examine the commitment-trust theory (CTT) of relationship marketing in the online retailing context. It seeks to theorize the antecedents and consequences of commitment and trust in the online context and identify how CTT can be adapted in a digitized business environment. Design/methodology/approach: Modified constructs and their measures are developed to understand the antecedents and the outcomes of commitment and trust. Survey data from British online customers (n ¼ 651) are used to test CTT hypotheses with structural equation modelling. Findings: The study suggests a significant modification to the traditional CTT model in the online environment. Privacy and security features of the website along with shared values are the key antecedents of trust, which in turn positively influences relationship commitment. Behavioural intentions of customers are consequences of both trust and commitment. The relationship termination cost has a negative impact on customer commitment. Research limitations/implications: The paper identifies interesting differences between the original work by Morgan and Hunt and the findings presented, but basically concludes that the commitment-trust theory applies to online retailing. Originality/value: Contributions of this study in re-examining the CTT model of relationship marketing in an online context are manifold. This paper proposes a modified model to understand the role of consumer trust and commitment in a digitized environment. The modified constructs and measures truly reflect the dynamism of online business. The extended CTT model can provide better insight into managing customer relationships in online retailing.

The relative influence of organisational commitment and job-satisfaction on service quality of customer-contact employees in banking call centres

An inter-disciplinary approach is adopted to provide a deeper understanding of the human resource-service quality relationship. The paper tests the relationships organisational commitment and job satisfaction have with service quality of customer-contact employees. Hypotheses are constructed by reviewing literature in the areas of human resource management and services marketing. A study comprising 342 employees was conducted in four telephone call centres of a major UK retail bank. Investigates how different forms of organisational commitment and job satisfaction influence the service quality delivered by contact employees. Findings indicate that job satisfaction and organisational commitment of employees have a significant impact on service quality delivered. The affective component of commitment was found to be more important than job satisfaction in determining service quality of customer-contact employees.

Does Role Clarity Explain Employee-Perceived Service Quality? A Study of Antecedents and Consequences in Call Centres

Purpose – Role clarity of frontline staff is critical to their perceptions of service quality in call centres. The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of role clarity and its antecedents and consequences on employee-perceived service quality. Design/methodology/approach – A conceptual model, based on the job characteristics model and cognitive theories, is proposed. Key antecedents of role clarity considered here are feedback, autonomy, participation, supervisory consideration, and team support; while key consequences are organizational commitment, job satisfaction and service quality. An internal marketing approach is adopted and all variables are measured from the frontline employees perspective. A structural equation model is developed and tested on a sample of 342 call centre representatives of a major commercial bank in the UK. Findings – The research reveals that role clarity plays a critical role in explaining employee perceptions of service quality. Further, the research findings indicate that feedback, participation and team support significantly influence role clarity, which in turn influences job satisfaction and organizational commitment. Research limitations/implications – The research suggests that boundary personnel in service firms should strive for more clarity in perceived role for delivering better service quality. The limitations are in sample availability from in-house transaction call centres of a single bank. Originality/value – The contributions of this study are untangling the confusing research evidence on the effect of role clarity on service quality, using service quality as a performance variable as opposed to productivity estimates, adopting an internal marketing approach to understanding the phenomenon, and introducing teamwork along with job-design and supervisory factors as antecedent to role clarity.

Antecedents and consequences of service quality in consumer evaluation of self-service internet technologies

Advances in technology coupled with increasing labour costs have caused service firms to explore self-service delivery options. Although some studies have focused on self-service and use of technology in service delivery, few have explored the role of service quality in consumer evaluation of technology-based self-service options. By integrating and extending the self-service quality framework the service evaluation model and the Technology Acceptance Model the authors address this emerging issue by empirically testing a comprehensive model that captures the antecedents and consequences of perceived service quality to predict continued customer interaction in the technology-based self-service context of Internet banking. Important service evaluation constructs like perceived risk, perceived value and perceived satisfaction are modelled in this framework. The results show that perceived control has the strongest influence on service quality evaluations. Perceived speed of delivery, reliability and enjoyment also have a significant impact on service quality perceptions. The study also found that even though perceived service quality, perceived risk and satisfaction are important predictors of continued interaction, perceived customer value plays a pivotal role in influencing continued interaction.

An empirical assessment of comparative approaches to service quality measurement

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to propose and empirically assess three comparative approaches to measuring service quality: modified gap model, TOPSIS and loss function. Aims to argue for the use of TOPSIS from decision sciences, and Loss function from operations research and engineering, as alternative approaches to the gap model.Design/methodology/approach – The empirical evidence is provided by large sample consumer data on the service quality for leading Indian commercial banks. The service quality evaluations obtained from these three distinct methods are compared and tested for their mutual agreement.Findings – Fndings show that the rankings obtained from different methods are statistically in agreement, suggesting that the alternative approaches can provide equally good measurement of service quality. But they should not be used in an interchangeable manner.Research/limitations/implications – Research shows that a single measure of overall service quality based on gap model is over‐simplist...

Insights into the Indian Call Centre Industry: Can Internal Marketing Help Tackle High Employee Turnover?

Purpose – Increasing turnover of frontline staff in call centres is detrimental to the delivery of quality service to customers. This paper aims to present the context for the rapid growth of the business process outsourcing (BPO) sector in India, and to address a critical issue faced by call centre organisations in this sector – the high employee turnover. Design/methodology/approach – Following a triangulation approach, two separate empirical investigations are conducted to examine various aspects of high labour turnover rates in the call centre sector in India. Study one examines the research issue via 51 in-depth interviews in as many units. Study two reports results from a questionnaire survey with 204 frontline agents across 11 call centres regarding employee turnover. Findings – This research reveals a range of reasons – from monotonous work, stressful work environment, adverse working conditions, lack of career development opportunities; to better job opportunities elsewhere, which emerge as the key causes of increasing attrition rates in the Indian call centre industry. Research limitations/implications – The research suggests that there are several issues that need to be handled carefully by management of call centres in India to overcome the problem of increasing employee turnover, and that this also demands support from the Indian government. Originality/value – The contributions of this study untangle the issues underlying a key problem in the call centre industry, i.e. employee turnover in the Indian call centre industry context. Adopting an internal marketing approach, it provides useful information for both academics and practitioners and suggests internal marketing interventions, and avenues for future research to combat the problem of employee turnover.

Analysing the Commitment - Service Quality Relationship: A Comparative Study of Retail Banking Call Centres and Branches

Adopting an internal marketing approach, this paper attempts to provide a deeper understanding of the organisational commitment – service quality relationship in the service context. This is done by empirically testing the relationships that the three components of organisational commitment (affective, continuance and normative) have with the service quality of customer-contact employees. The hypotheses were framed by critically reviewing the extant literature in the areas of services marketing and human resource management. A large sample comparative study was conducted on employees in call centres and branches of a major retail bank in UK. We explore the important question of how the three components of organisational commitment influence the employee-perceived service quality differently in call centres and in branches. The findings indicate that in branches, both affective commitment and continuance commitment have significant positive impact on service quality while in call centres, only affective commitment is found to affect service quality significantly. Having established the commitment – service quality relationship, the implications for designing internal marketing strategies are further discussed.

E‐healthcare: an analysis of key themes in research

Purpose – Healthcare is among the fastest-growing sectors in both developed and emerging economies. E-healthcare is contributing to the explosive growth within this industry by utilizing the internet and all its capabilities to support its stakeholders with information searches and communication processes. The purpose of this paper is to present the state-of-the-art and to identify key themes in research on e-healthcare.Design/methodology/approach – A review of the literature in the marketing and management of e-healthcare was conducted to determine the major themes pertinent to e-healthcare research as well as the commonalities and differences within these themes.Findings – Based on the literature review, the five major themes of e-healthcare research identified are: cost savings; virtual networking; electronic medical records; source credibility and privacy concerns; and physician-patient relationships.Originality/value – Based on these major themes, managerial implications for e-healthcare are formulated. Suggestions are offered to facilitate healthcare service organizations’ attempts to further implement and properly utilize e-healthcare in their facilities. These propositions will also help these stakeholders develop and streamline their e-healthcare processes already in use. E-healthcare systems enable firms to improve efficiency, to reduce costs, and to facilitate the coordination of care across multiple facilities.

Does data warehouse end-user metadata add value?

Many data warehouses are currently underutilized by managers and knowledge workers. Can high-quality end-user metadata help to increase levels of adoption and use?

Corporate Identity and Consumer Marketing: A Process Model and Research Agenda

The paper reviews the state‐of‐the‐art in corporate identity (CI) literature and offers new directions for the application of corporate identity in consumer marketing. The authors expand the conventional understanding of the corporate identity‐image management process by unveiling the ‘black box’ of the process of translating corporate identity to consumer responses and performance based on analysis of consumer psychology, i.e. consumer identification and image‐congruity. Moreover, the authors also argue that the potentiality of application of corporate identity in consumer marketing research has not been fully recognized. What follow in the paper are future research directions and a research agenda grounded in the positive/normative, micro/macro, and specialized/integrative taxonomy. This paper expands the traditional corporate identity domain, which mainly focused on strategic marketing and corporate issues, by incorporating the consumer marketing perspective.