High tech, high touch: The effect of employee skills and customer heterogeneity on customer satisfaction with enterprise system support services

Although firms have invested significant resources in implementing enterprise software systems (ESS) to modernize and integrate their business process infrastructure, customer satisfaction with ESS has remained an understudied phenomenon. In this exploratory research study, we investigate customer satisfaction for support services of ESS and focus on employee skills and customer heterogeneity. We analyze archival customer satisfaction data from 170 real-world customer service encounters of a leading ESS vendor. Our analysis indicates that the technical and behavioral skills of customer support representatives play a major role in influencing overall customer satisfaction with ESS support services. We find that the effect of technical skills on customer satisfaction is moderated by behavioral skills. We also find that the technical skills of the support personnel are valued more by repeat customers than by new customers. We discuss the implications of these findings for managing customer heterogeneity in ESS support services and for the allocation and training of ESS support personnel. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.