Business Value of IT-Enabled Call Centers: An Empirical Analysis

Corporate information technology (IT) investments in customer support and service such as CRM systems have been on a steady rise. Of late, the primary interest has shifted toward assessment of returns on these investments. This research attempts to assess the value of IT investments in a customer support setting using a process-level analysis. Given the lack of academic IS research in the area of customer support and value of IT in the service context, this study aims to bridge this gap by building on prior business value of IT literature. In order to identify the contribution of IT in the context of our study, we explicitly control for personnel-specific factors and customer-specific factors. Our findings indicate that IT enabled call centers significantly improve the performance of the customer support process. Further, we also find that the benefits from IT enabled call centers may be higher when the customer-reported problems are complex and difficult to resolve. In addition, we find that both personnel-specific factors and customer-specific factors significantly influence the business benefits from IT in call center and customer support applications.