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Reported studies on call centers emphasize efficiency and control, with possible implications for service priorities, customer orientation and service quality. However, there is little empirical research to test assumptions from the customer’s perspective. This study aimed to establish whether customers expected (predicted) low levels of service from a call center, how this level compared to the minimum level they considered adequate, and whether the perceived customer orientation of the call center was related to service quality expectations. Data were collected in Australia from two sources: end consumers (n = 289) of an insurance provider, and business customers (n = 325) of a bank. Key findings were similar for both samples. First, customers had very high levels of adequate (minimum) expectations, and adequate expectations behaved independently from predicted (forecast) expectations. Second, customer orientation was associated with predicted expectations but not adequate expectations. The paper concludes with suggestions for future research and managerial implications.

Investigating the day of week and hour of day temporal patterns of crime typically show that (late) nights and weekends are the prime time for criminal activity. Though instructive, mental-health-related calls for service are a significant component of police service to the community that have not been a part of this research. The purpose of this paper is to analyze calls for police service that relate to mental health, using intimate partner/domestic related calls for police service for context.

Approximately 20,000 mental health related and 20,000 intimate partner/domestic related calls for police service are analyzed. Intra-week and intra-day temporal patterns are analyzed using circular statistics.

Mental-health-related calls for police service have a distinct temporal pattern for both days of the week and hours of the day. Specifically, these calls for police service peak during the middle of the week and in the mid-afternoon.

This is the first analysis regarding the temporal patterns of police calls for service for mental health-related calls. The results have implications for police resourcing and scheduling, especially in the context of special teams for addressing mental health-related calls for police service.

The present analysis examines police incident‐based activity in a public housing setting. Calls for service to the Philadelphia Housing Authority Police Department are described by call types in order to identify requests for police services by residents of the Philadelphia Housing Authority. Findings from the current research are compared and contrasted to what has been discovered about incident‐based activity in municipal police departments. The analysis reveals that public housing police respond in about the same proportion as municipal police to calls for service related to public order and (in some cases) reactive law enforcement, but that differential service demands exist, which are identified and placed in the public housing context. Additionally, it is found that incident‐driven activity levels in public housing are much lower than criminological research on crime in public housing might suggest. Implications for future research are discussed.

This paper examines how the Australian Quality Council and the European Foundation for Quality Management address issues of access and corporate responsibility through their respective devices, namely the Australian Business Excellence Framework and the EFQM Excellence Model. It then examines the impact of the UK and Australian Disability Discrimination Legislation in light of UK and Australian studies on the provision of services for the hearing impaired by call centres.

The purpose of this conceptual paper is to examine key operational tradeoffs and challenges that call center managers face.

To support the concepts advanced in this paper, an embedded case study is used from an inbound call center for a regional wireless phone company that operates in the USA. The research involved: a review of available service quality and call center management literature; development of a resource‐based framework to understand key operational tradeoffs; use of a case study approach with structured interviews of key managers and employees; and synthesis of this data in order to understand why and how these managers made key operational tradeoff decisions. The case study was done on an inbound customer service call center for a regional wireless phone company that operates in the Southeastern USA.

This research suggests that there are four key resource management decisions that must be addressed in order to improve service quality and effectively manage call center operations: the efficient deployment and use of labor, effective leveraging of technology, capacity management, and demand management.

The use of a single case approach limits the generalizability of results; however, this methodology is effective in providing rich data and a research framework to both build theory and advance future research in this arena.

It is noteworthy that while technology, capacity management, and demand management systems are essential, labor remains a key differentiator in achieving high service quality. A call center must provide dependable service with knowledgeable, honest, polite and empathetic employees who can efficiently answer customers' questions while also promoting more products and services to improve profitability.

While this research is primarily conceptual, it also uses a case study to explain why and how managers make key tradeoffs in order to compete effectively on service quality in the call center industry.

This paper aims to report on a study that investigated employees' views on the organizational factors that affect their ability to deliver service quality to customers. The study is important because call centers represent unique work environments and they have not been used in the development of service quality theory.

Ten focus groups of frontline employees who work in a telecommunications call center in Australia were conducted. Data were subjected to content analysis.

Nine major themes were identified. Some of these themes are evident in theory arising from service quality gaps, service climate, and service profit chain studies. Other themes include whether managers emphasize sales or efficiency, rather than service quality; approaches to performance monitoring and feedback, role and productivity demands, quality assurance regimes, and employees' experiences of service encounter stress.

The findings suggest that various factors from prior work need to be integrated and extended to enhance service quality in call centers. However, data were collected from only one call center.

The present study suggests that to deliver high levels of service quality, call center managers need to rethink their approaches to productivity and performance management, and hiring and supporting the “right” service staff.

This paper re‐examines service quality in the specific context of call centers. It provides an organizational focus and complements recent work that has tested the role of employee attitudes in service quality studies. The paper concludes with a model for testing.

A strong body of research has established the concentration of crime in a small number of street segments or “hot spots” throughout urban cities, but the spatial distribution of mental health-related calls for services is less well known. The extent to which these calls are concentrated on a small number of street segments, similar to traditional crime calls for service is understudied. The purpose of this paper is to examine the concentration of mental health calls and the spatial distribution of street segments with mental health calls to provide directions for law enforcement and place-based policing.

Using call for service data from a large city on the East coast, the current study examines whether mental health calls for service are concentrated on street segments, and tests spatial dispersion to whether these “mental health hot spots” are spread throughout the city or clustered in space. Finally, the authors explore the relationship between mental health calls and violent and drug calls by calculating the correlation and using a spatial point pattern test to determine if mental health calls are spatially similar to violent and drug calls.

The authors found that mental health calls are concentrated on street segments; specifically 22.4 percent of calls are located on 0.5 percent of city street segments. Additionally, these street segments are fairly dispersed throughout the city. When comparing the spatial similarity of mental health calls to violent and drug calls, they are highly correlated suggesting a relationship between the calls types, but the location of mental health calls appears to be different from violet and drug calls.

Very few studies have examined the location of mental health calls and whether they are concentrated in small areas similar to crime, but such research can provide police officers new approaches to working with people with mental health problems. The police are the primary emergency response for calls involving someone with a mental illness or experiencing a mental health crisis and the authors provide suggestions for policing that draw from strategies used in hot spot policing and mental health responses, like CIT, to address challenges of modern policing and working with people with mental health problems.

Awareness of inconsistencies and variability in the delivery of health services across the UK has heightened in recent years, leading to general acknowledgement that a move away from “health care by post code” is a strategic priority for the National Health Service (NHS). NHS Direct, a call centre service for patients and their carers, is unique in the NHS in that it represents an entirely new service concept, with a rare opportunity to design a single nation‐wide service from scratch, and to manage and co‐ordinate a delivery system consistently throughout the country. Evaluates the strategic alignment of NHS Direct during the first three years of implementation through an analysis of its service concept, its operational objectives, the design of its delivery systems and its volume and variety characteristics. The evaluation reveals an absence of a central design specification which has resulted in wide variation in the call centres’ service portfolios, resource bases, competences, telephony and clinical expert systems. Contends that variation and variability in the design of the call centres has severely compromised NHS Direct's ability to meet its strategic and operational objectives, resulting in strategic misalignment. Also identifies missed opportunities to learn from the growing call centre literature and from service shops in other industries.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the distribution of police response time to in-progress burglaries differ according to the level of social disorganization across different neighborhoods.

Using 2006 calls for service data collected from the Dallas and Houston Police Departments and from the 2000 US Bureau of Census statistics, the effects of social disorganization on police performance were examined through multilevel analysis of the distribution of police response time patterns across different neighborhoods in Dallas and Houston.

The analysis of the DPD and HPD in-progress calls produced somewhat consistent findings on the relationship between the level of social disorganization and police response time. Concentrated disadvantage, immigrant concentration, and residential stability are important predictors of the distribution of police response time patterns in Dallas and Houston.

Neighborhood social disorganization is related to the distribution of agency response time patterns. Detailed response time analysis is crucial for agencies to improve police performance and the community-police relationship.

In the policing literature, researchers have tended to neglect rapid response when examining many aspects of policing. The present study expands on existing research by examining the theoretical link between the level of neighborhood social disorganization with the distribution of rapid police response to in-progress burglary in two cities.

This paper reviews the transformation of requests for police services, specifically examining the various categories of assault. The impact of housing, race, education level, police workload, neighbourhood criminal history, type of call, call‐taker input, priority (seriousness) originally assigned to the call, and decision to despatch are assessed. Moreover, the paper will: identify the processes police agencies use in classifying crime; identify the conditions under which requests for service are transformed by call‐takers and despatchers; examine the impact of precursors to a request for services being made, including social and contextual (ecological), and prior workload variables; and examine the impact of factors occurring concurrent to the taking of a call.