Comparing the Communication Characteristics of High Competence and Lowe Competence Customer Service Representatives

Abstract

When dissatisfied customers complain directly to a company, customer service representatives are responsible for communicating with these customers and resolving their complaints. Despite the importance of communication in this process, little is known about the communication characteristics of high competence and low competence customer service representatives. To address this issue, we content analyzed the communication used by high competence and low competence customer service representatives in a regional telephone service company. Our results revealed that, compared to low competence representatives, high competence service representatives talk more about attribution issues and their interactions with dissatisfied customers are significantly longer. Based on these results, we recommend that customer service managers should train their service representatives to focus more on identifying the causes of customers' problems. Also, we recommend that service representatives' performance evaluations should be based on their ability to resolve customers' complaints, not on how quickly they can process customers' calls.