The Relationship between Employee Attributes and Customer Satisfaction: A Case of South African Call Centre Industry

Business survival, success and profitability are in the final instance customer or client dependent, therefore, every enterprise aims at maximising customer need-satisfaction in the endeavour to maximise profitability. With this in mind, the primary objective of this study is to establish the relationship between customer satisfaction and employee attributes as experienced by call centre customers. In addition, the study investigated how customers prioritise service quality dimensions as well as the mediating role played by customer satisfaction on the linkage between service quality and customer loyalty. To accomplish this, firstly, the direct relationship between the individual independent variables was tested and secondly, the indirect relationship between service quality and customer loyalty via customer satisfaction was tested. A combination of simple and multiple regression analysis was applied to test the hypothesised relationships. The results show that employee attributes and call centre key service factors significantly impact customer satisfaction and that call centre customers prioritise service quality dimensions differently. The mediating role of customer satisfaction on the linkage between service quality and customer loyalty was partially significant