Service personnel, technology, and their interaction in influencing customer satisfaction

Managing both the technologies and the personnel needed for providing high-quality, multichannel customer support creates a complex and persistent operational challenge. Adding to this difficulty, it is still unclear how service personnel and these new communication technologies interact to influence the customer's perceptions of the service being provided. Motivated by both practical importance and inconsistent findings in the academic literature, this exploratory research examines the interaction of media richness, represented by three different technology contexts ( telephone, e-mail, and online chat), with six customer service representative (CSR) characteristics and their influences on customer satisfaction. Using a large-sample customer survey data set, the article develops a multigroup structural equation model to analyze these interactions. Results suggest that CSR characteristics influence customer service satisfaction similarly across all three technology-mediated contexts. Of the characteristics studied, service representatives contribute to customer satisfaction more when they exhibit the characteristics of thoroughness, knowledgeableness, and preparedness, regardless of the richness of the medium used. Surprisingly, while three other CSR characteristics studied ( courtesy, professionalism, and attentiveness) are traditionally believed to be important in face-to-face encounters, they had no significant impact on customer satisfaction in the technology-mediated contexts studied. Implications for both practitioners and researchers are drawn from the results and future research opportunities are discussed.