Forum for Science, Industry and Business

How to make customers happy

Are you having trouble with the dishwasher? Or with a computer, that doesn’t work as it should do? Or with an incomprehensible instruction manual for the new book shelf? No problem – there is a service hotline for cases like these after all.

But if you call them, in most cases you won’t be able to talk to someone close by, but you will be transferred to a call center abroad instead. To cut costs many companies have not only moved their production units, but also their customer services departments to cheaper offshore locations.

The researchers interviewed more than 800 customers of German speaking call centers with locations in Germany, Poland and Turkey for their study. They examined how the location of the call center, the perceived accent of the call center agents and their customer orientation were reflected in the customers’ assessment of the call center’s performance. Assessment criteria were, amongst others, the customer satisfaction relating to the agent’s service, the trust put into them and if the customers were at the end willing to recommend the service hotline in question. While customers clearly perceived the different accent in the case of foreign call centers, this was scarcely of any importance to them in the evaluation of the service provided by the agents. Knowledge of the location – in the home country or abroad – was no reason to complain about the consulting service for most customers. The results of the new study show that the only decisive criterion for a positive evaluation was the customer orientation of the call center agents. Therefore, the economists recommend companies to put a stronger focus on this aspect when they are recruiting call center staff – no matter if in Germany or abroad.

Dr. Ute Schönfelder | idw
Further information:
http://www.uni-jena.de/

Im Focus: Temperature-controlled fiber-optic light source with liquid core

In a recent publication in the renowned journal Optica, scientists of Leibniz-Institute of Photonic Technology (Leibniz IPHT) in Jena showed that they can accurately control the optical properties of liquid-core fiber lasers and therefore their spectral band width by temperature and pressure tuning.

Already last year, the researchers provided experimental proof of a new dynamic of hybrid solitons– temporally and spectrally stationary light waves resulting...

Im Focus: Overdosing on Calcium

Nano crystals impact stem cell fate during bone formation

Scientists from the University of Freiburg and the University of Basel identified a master regulator for bone regeneration. Prasad Shastri, Professor of...

Im Focus: AchemAsia 2019 will take place in Shanghai

Moving into its fourth decade, AchemAsia is setting out for new horizons: The International Expo and Innovation Forum for Sustainable Chemical Production will take place from 21-23 May 2019 in Shanghai, China. With an updated event profile, the eleventh edition focusses on topics that are especially relevant for the Chinese process industry, putting a strong emphasis on sustainability and innovation.

Founded in 1989 as a spin-off of ACHEMA to cater to the needs of China’s then developing industry, AchemAsia has since grown into a platform where the latest...

Im Focus: First real-time test of Li-Fi utilization for the industrial Internet of Things

The BMBF-funded OWICELLS project was successfully completed with a final presentation at the BMW plant in Munich. The presentation demonstrated a Li-Fi communication with a mobile robot, while the robot carried out usual production processes (welding, moving and testing parts) in a 5x5m² production cell. The robust, optical wireless transmission is based on spatial diversity; in other words, data is sent and received simultaneously by several LEDs and several photodiodes. The system can transmit data at more than 100 Mbit/s and five milliseconds latency.

Modern production technologies in the automobile industry must become more flexible in order to fulfil individual customer requirements.

Im Focus: Sharp images with flexible fibers

An international team of scientists has discovered a new way to transfer image information through multimodal fibers with almost no distortion - even if the fiber is bent. The results of the study, to which scientist from the Leibniz-Institute of Photonic Technology Jena (Leibniz IPHT) contributed, were published on 6thJune in the highly-cited journal Physical Review Letters.

Endoscopes allow doctors to see into a patient’s body like through a keyhole. Typically, the images are transmitted via a bundle of several hundreds of optical...