UNIVERSITY OF ECONOMICS HO CHI MINH CITY INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL OF BUSINESS ------------------------ NGUYEN QUOC VIEN FACTORS AFFECTING THE UTILIZATION OF CALL CENTERIN CUSTOMER SERVICE BY FIRMS IN VIETNAM MARKET MASTER OF BUSINESS (Honours) Ho Chi Minh City - year 2014 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com UNIVERSITY OF ECONOMICS HO CHI MINH CITY INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL OF BUSINESS ------------------------ NGUYEN QUOC VIEN FACTORS AFFECTING THE UTILIZATION OF CALL CENTERIN CUSTOMER SERVICE BY FIRMS IN VIETNAM MARKET ID: 22110079 MASTER OF BUSINESS (Honours) SUPERVISOR: Dr. ĐINH THAI HOANG Ho Chi Minh City - year 2014 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com ACKNOWLEDGEMENT During the process of writing my thesis, I had coped with difficulties and obstacle that I could not anticipate. The pressure of daily work seems to make me give up my study. However, thanks to the encouraging of my supervisor, Dr.
Dinh Thai Hoang, I was received a great will to overcome step by step the difficulties. I own my deepest gratitude to my supervisor, Dr. Dinh Thai Hoang, who with his wide research experience, guided me to complete this topic. Without his continuous support, encouragement, and enthusiasm, this research would hardly have been completed.
I am indebted to Dr. Nguyen Dinh Tho for his immeasurable amount of teaching and guidance during the research design course. I would like to thank Ms. Thai Thi Thu Giang, my friend at University of Economics Ho Chi Minh City, who introduced me the MBUS course at ISB and encouraged me to go to the end of the course.
I also express my warmest gratitude to my professors at ISB, University of Economics Ho Chi Minh City for their teaching and guidance during my MBUS course I wish to thank warmly my classmates who showed their teamwork spirit and willingness to help each other to complete our theses. Finally, this thesis is dedicated to my beloved parent and daughter who understand, encourage, and sympathize with me especially in making the convenient environment during my work of this dissertation. 1 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com ABSTRACT This thesis aims to investigate the factors that affect the utilization of call center in customer service by firms in Vietnam, especially in Ho Chi Minh City – a biggest and dynamic center business of Vietnam. Many Vietnamese firms are using the call center as a tool for their customer service channel; however, the benefits that Vietnamese customer orientation firms or broader the orientation market firms gain from its customer focus or market focus through call center system either directly or indirectly remain unknown.
The study uses quantitative research method with the sample size of 230 enterprises including firms are utilizing the call center for their own, firms are using the call center outsourcing service and firms have hotline number to serve their customers. The reliability, convergent and discriminant validity of scales was tested by Cronbach’s Alpha coefficient and exploratory factor analysis then regression analysis was done to find out the correlation between the concepts in the theoretical model. This study finds that the key concepts in the technology acceptance model (TAM), perceived ease of use of the call center, cannot be used to predict call center utilization by organizations. Other concepts: perceived usefulness of call center, market orientation and service innovation are predictors of call center utilization.
Learning orientation facilitates market orientation, perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use of the call center by Vietnamese firms. The result of this research assist in identifying keys factors that lead Vietnamese firms to adopt using the call center as a tool to take care, retain their customers and develop market in globalization stage; moreover, this study shows that both large enterprises and SME also gain the benefits from using call center by choosing the right form of call center investment; owning a call center or using call center outsourcing. Keywords: Call center utilization, market orientation, learning orientation, contact center in Vietnam. 2 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENT .2 LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES.
Contact center introduction .10 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW & HYPOTHESES. Technology Acceptance Model – TAM. TAM and contact center utilization. Market and learning orientations and intention to adopt call center system.
Service innovation and call center utilization .18 CHAPTER 3: RESEARCH METHOD. Data collection, purifying and coding data .24 CHAPTER 4: DATA ANALYSIS AND RESULTS. Market Orientation Cronbach’s Alpha.30 3 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail. Learning orientation Cronbach’s Alpha.
Commitment to learning. Perceived usefulness of call center. Perceived easy to use call center. Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA).
EFA of Market orientation concept. EFA of Learning orientation. EFA of Perceived usefulness, Perceived ease of use and Service innovation. Limitation and directions for future research.58 APPENDIX 1: Research process .65 APPENDIX 2: Scale Items .66 APPENDIX 3: Scale Items refinement .69 APPENDIX 4: Factor analysis.72 APPENDIX 5: Regression analysis .75 APPENDIX 6: The result of qualitative survey.77 4 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES Figure 1: Theory of reasoned action .11 Figure 2: Original technology acceptance model .12 Figure 3: A conceptual model of call center utilization.19 Figure 4: Model regression results .49 Table -5: Cronbach’s Alpha of three components in Market orientation concept .31 Table-10: Cronbach’s Alpha of three components in Learning orientation concept .74 Table-45: The summary of verifying hypothesis in conceptual model .49 5 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1.
Contact center introduction Nowadays, people regularly receive calls or messages from the customer service center of telecommunication companies, banks, insurance organizations, hospitals, transportation companies, game online companies and consumer firms… or even calls for telesales and telemarketing. The question is how they can make a lot of calls; send a hundreds of messages at the same time to their customers, how they can remember all the customer numbers and detail of each transaction. That is a call center; thus, what is the call center? As defined by North American Quitline Consortium (NAQC), call center is a place where contacts are made and received. It is often the “front door” to a business and is the place where most crucial customer interactions take place.
Therefore, its effective and efficient operation is a key ingredient to the overall success of any organization (NAQC, 2010). There are five main operational functions in any type of call center: workforce management, quality management, technology management, report and communications and financial management. Call centers provide a single contact for customers who may try to reach a company via multiple channels: e-mail, Web chat, fax, and phone, short message service (SMS) or VoIP (voice over Internet protocol). Call centers, often called contact centers to reflect the multiple points of access, provide staff with consistent information throughout an integrated system; the term call center is used interchangeably with contact center.
These centers capture data from across the enterprise and consolidate customer-related information into a central database. This integration improves the customer's interaction and satisfaction and enhances the efficiency of the business operation (Duane Sharp, 2003). 6 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com Large organizations such as telecommunication companies, insurance and financial firms may choose to outsource its call center services, as a professional call center will be able to provide the systems and trained workforce to provide quality service to customers. Research background Vietnam's economic growth rate has been among the highest in the Asia Pacific region in recent years 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 respectively 6.
Growth in services eased to 5.9%, this sector still made the largest contribution to GDP growth, at 2. With customer service becoming a key focus in Asia Pacific, Vietnam is improving customer relationships for the purpose of greater loyalty, brand recall, and profitability. Adopting using the call center or call center service is one of the best ways to improve the customer satisfaction and customer relationship by firms in Vietnam, that’s because there’s a growth in call center in recent years. According to Dao Thi Minh Thao, a research associate in the ICT Practice at Frost & Sullivan APAC, this effort is leading to an impressive growth in Vietnam’s contact center industry that was estimated to be worth $4.2 million in 2011 and is expected to reach $11.4 million in 2018, with a growth rate of 15 percent.
Most contact center projects in Vietnam are deployed by banks, financial institutions, and telco service providers. These sectors require a high level of customer care; large seat numbers are needed to always be available to serve customers. She also commented that “for further growth and success, small and middle-sized enterprises (SME) should look forward to more efficient contact center application adoption to align these trends for the future. Emerging global vendors in providing suitable solutions also need to offer more customized solutions and effective marketing activities at more affordable price” (Donna Jeremiah, 2012).
7 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com Realizing the potential and advantages of call center, many researches on call center and its effectiveness were taken. Most of them focus on the advantages such as customer satisfaction in using and outsourcing call center and service quality in call center operation. In researches indicating the advantages of call center, application of the technologies involved in call center operations can play a key role in accessing more customers, and in providing better quality services especially where additional or extended services become available (Walker and Craig-Lees, 1998). However, call center is a new form of technology in Vietnam; it has just developed in recent years when firms think of customer.
There is almost no theoretical research for this type of service technology; thus this is an opportunity for this study. Research problem In Vietnam, it’s easy to realize call center is used by most of banks, financial and insurance firms, telecommunication companies, hospitals, transportation companies, game online companies and consumer firms…. What are the motivations that lead the firms choosing the call center as tool for customer service channel? The fact is that there is no previous studies mention the evolution of the call center, analyzing the technologies that have contributed to its growth, providing guidelines for the development and implementation of a call center as well as the management of the facility, and the role of human factors that can make a call center a successful operation. Especially, there is no empirical research on what factors effecting the utilization of call center in customer service by firms in Vietnam.
Vietnamese firms just remark the benefits and advantages of using call center through the trend of customer care service what the other big companies did to retain their customers; however, these benefits must be deeply based on the orientation of each organization. The question as regards how Vietnamese customer orientation service firm (large or small firm) or broader how the Vietnamese orientation market firm (large or small firm) benefits from its 8 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com customer focus or market focus through call center system either directly or indirectly remain unknown. This leads to finding the key factors effecting the call center utilization by firms in Vietnam. According to (Duane Sharp, 2003), call centers are an essential part of any business that deals frequently with customer queries.
Not only large organizations with huge customer get the benefits from using call center but SME can also get these benefits by choosing outsourcing call center services. Building a call center internally may be feasible only for very large enterprises, smaller companies should consider outsourcing their call centers to organizations that specialize in providing these services and already have the latest technologies installed and operating, with trained staff. These organizations can often provide excellent customer-oriented services, relieving smaller organizations of the financial, managerial, and human resources issues involved in an internal, corporate call center.