고객센터에서 상담사의 직무탈진감이 고객지향성, 직무만족 및 이직의도에 미치는 영향

A customer center is a specialized division of a firm that directly deals with customer interactions at the front-line service encounter. From firm’s perspective, a customer center is a key division that executes customer relationship management (CRM) by which customer satisfaction and customer loyalty are maintained and new potential customers are acquired. On the other side of the coin, customers view customer centers as a major channel to contact firms due to an enriched accessibility and convenience promised by the centers. Recently,telephone contacts to customer centers have been, at large, active worldwide. However, the online chatting and video counseling, attributable to ongoing development in IT technology,have been widely getting into deployment. While these trends indicate an increasing importance in the functioning of the customer centers from both firms’ and customers’ perspectives,attention and resource allocation on customer service representative (CSR) are insufficient. The role and job obligation of the CSR are getting much important and sophisticated. Nevertheless, the social recognition for the CSR’s job function has still remained relatively low. Under these circumstances, this study focuses on CSRs’ job burnout - the most troublesome situation on work. In a customer center, CSRs are easily exposed to high levels of job burnout during a large number of interactions with customers who have various service demands and complaints. Job burnout of a CSR give rise to negative outcomes like high turnover, reduced customer orientation and decreased job satisfaction to a customer center. Therefore, job burnout of a CSR is an important part to be considered in managing a customer center. To explain CSRs’ job burnout, we derive the most severe factors,postulated in the literature, that are vulnerable to increase job burnout as well as the factors that decrease the burnout. We consider role ambiguity, work overload, an emotional labor as the factors increasing job burnout. The decreasing factors, on the other side, consist of monitoring and/or feedback, supervisor’s support, and career path development. In this study, we empirically assess the individual effects of those factors on job burnout. Next, we examine how job burnout is essentially related to the variables on performance such as turnover intention, customer orientation, and job satisfaction. In addition, we empirically test the relationships among job satisfaction, customer orientation, and turnover intention. A survey was conducted with CSRs in the customer center. A total of 272 responses from six customer centers were used for the analysis. The major findings are as follows. First,CSR’s job burnout increases due to role ambiguity, work overload, and emotional labour. Generally, customer centers have the standard job manual for customer service which describes CSR’s role, responsibility, and authority. In addition, customer centers continue to offer training and learning programs to a CSR. This is effective to reduce CSR’s role ambiguity,and consequently it is beneficial to diminishing job burnout. When a CSR experiences work overload, that is, a CSR has a difficulty to deal with works at a given time, CSR’s job burnout increases. Therefore, a customer center tries to resolve work overload of a CSR by grasping a reasonable workload. In terms of emotional labour, a customer center should try to manage an emotional labour of a CSR experiencing in many interactions with customers. A CSR does an emotional labour in that a CSR continuously expresses a certain emotion required by an organization irrespective of own real emotion and thinking. Second, only supervisor support is effective in decreasing job burnout while monitoring/feedback and career path development are not statistically significant for job burnout. Note that offering a CSR career path to discourage turnover could increase job burnout although the effect of career path on job burnout is not significant. Offering clear and accurate feedback on performance and monitoring is not related to reducing job burnout. Third, job burnout decreases customer orientation and job satisfaction, and it significantly increases turnover intention. Nowadays, high turnover is considered as the most difficult problem that a customer center has to resolve because it brings about the heavy costs followed by staffing and training a new CSR. The result implies that a customer center can resolve high turnover of a CSR through job burnout management. Besides, by reducing job burnout, a customer center makes a CSR offer customer-oriented service which is strongly related to customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. Finally, job satisfaction contributes to increasing customer orientation. However, it does not decrease the turnover intention. This finding is consistent with an assertion of internal marketing that CSR’s job satisfaction should be a pre-conditional factor for maximizing external customer satisfaction. This result confirms that turnover of a CSR is strongly related to job burnout. This study has a considerable implication by offering an evidence that CSR’s job burnout management is essential part to resolve high turnover and to offer superior customer service in a customer center.