Employees´ Technology Readiness and Service Quality in Mexican Call Centers

Abstract

This research brings evidence that technological readiness of call center agents in Mexico, that is how ready employees are to embrace new technologies, is an important antecedent of the service quality they deliver, once we controlled by other key determinants of the service quality in this industry such as commitment and job satisfaction. A survey was designed to assess a variant of Parasuraman and Colby (2001) Technological Readiness Index or TRI, service quality and other relevant variables in a sample of 420 contact employees of a call center located in Mexico. Evidence indicates that agents that score high in TRI scale render better service quality than agents with low TRI scores. Moreover, service quality improves more when TRI improves, than when job satisfaction and organizational commitment do. The study suggest managers might use TRI as a diagnostic tool to recruit customer contact employees and also for segmenting them; they can decide which type of trainee they need and allocate employees to job positions according to their technological readiness skills. Few attempts have been done in order to incorporate the technological dimension in studying the service quality of customer contact employees. The main contribution of the study is showing this dimension indeed matters at least in emerging countries such as Mexico.