Does Web-based self service reduce telephone calls to call center: an Empirical Analysis

TL;DRAbstract

We conduct a field study on a prominent US health insurance firm to examine the cost saving rationale for deploying self service at the call centers. In our setting, firm introduced web self-service portal for its members to contain large telephone handling cost at its call center. Management Practitioners claim that per interaction cost of web based self service channel is an order of magnitude cheaper than the assisted channels of customer service like telephony. However, they do not account for the impact of web based self service usage on the demand for other assisted channels. Surprisingly, the net effect of web based self service on other assisted channels of customer service has not been empirically validated so far. Drawing from the vertical differentiation literature in economics and human information acquisition and processing theories from psychology, we present a theoretical framework to show that both possibilities may exist (1) the web based self-service substitutes the a

Chat with Paper

AI Agents for this Paper