Employees' perceptions of the assessment/evaluation of customer service at the Telkom Call Centre.

• Main Author: Mkhize, Sifiso Mduduzi.
• Other Authors: MacDonald, John.
• Language: en
• Published: 2012
• Subjects: Service industries > Customer services.; Service industries > Management.; Performance standards.; Performance > Evaluation.; Theses > Business administration.
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10413/5403

Call Centres employ frontline staff commonly known as service consultants who interact with customers within the service oganisation.In order for organizations to ensure that they derive satisfaction from interactions with frontline employees as part of their main objectives, they make use of a human resource practice widely known as performance appraisals or assessments in order to determine if employees’ performance during their interactions with customers produce organization’s desired outcomes i.e. satisfied customers. Organizations use performance appraisals for multiple purposes chiefly amongst them being developmental and administrative. This study sought to investigate perceptions held by employees towards the purposes or objectives of the system employed in their organization to assess their service interactions with customers, their perceptions of fairness of the system, and how such fairness relates to their satisfaction with the assessment outcomes. A survey approach was used to collect data and the instrument used was a self-administered questionnaire. There were 410 questionnaires distributed via email to employees working within service assurance call centres situated in Bloemfontein, Cape Town and Gauteng. A total of 117 questionnaires were returned by the respondents. Data collected was managed and analysed using the SPSS program. The findings of the study indicated that employees perceive the uses of assessing their service interactions with customers as both developmental and administrative, perceive fair outcomes and procedures used in determining the outcomes, they are satisfied with assessment outcomes, view the system used to assess their interactions as effective and trustworthy. The fairness of outcomes and procedural fairness variables were found to be strongly and positively related to satisfaction with assessment outcomes. Both fairness variables were found to have a unique contribution towards the prediction of the satisfaction with assessment outcomes variable. The main recommendation of the study is that management need to consider increasing fairness in the decisions involving employees’ performance as it has been found that such increase results in a positive increase on the employees’ satisfaction with outcomes generated from the assessment or evaluation of their service interactions with customers. === Thesis (MBA)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Westville, 2010.