High Tech, High Touch: The Effect of Employee Skills and Customer Heterogeneity on Customer Satisfaction with Enterprise System Support Services

Publication Type

Journal Article

Publication Date

2008

Abstract

Athough firms have invested significant resources in implementing enterprise software systems (ESS) to modernize and integrate their business process infrastructure, customer satisfaction with ESS has remained an understudied phenomenon. In this exploratory research study, we investigate customer satisfaction for support services of ESS and focus on employee skills and customer heterogeneity. We analyze archival customer satisfaction data from 170 real-world customer service encounters of a leading ESS vendor. Our analysis indicates that the technical and behavioral skills of customer support representatives play a major role in influencing overall customer satisfaction with ESS support services. We find that the effect of technical skills on customer satisfaction is moderated by behavioral skills. We also find that the technical skills of the support personnel are valued more by repeat customers than by new customers. We discuss the implications of these findings for managing customer heterogeneity in ESS support services and for the allocation and training of ESS support personnel.

Keywords

User service, Business process, Satisfaction, Clientele, Resource management, Behavioral analysis, Integrated management, Firm management, Business model, Heterogeneity, Employee

Discipline

Computer Sciences | Management Information Systems

Research Areas

Information Systems and Management

Publication

Decision Support Systems

Volume

44

Issue

2

First Page

509

Last Page

523

ISSN

0167-9236

Identifier

10.1016/j.dss.2007.06.005

Publisher

Elsevier

Comments

In third round of review

Additional URL

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.dss.2007.06.005

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