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This paper analyzes the availability of electronic customer relationship management (E‐CRM) features on retail Web sites and their relationship to consumer satisfaction and site traffic. The top 100 specialty store, standard retail store, and Internet retailer Web sites were analyzed for the presence of 41 E‐CRM features. The availability of these features was then assessed for their relationship with consumer traffic to the site and customer satisfaction with the site. Internet retailers were significantly more likely to have E‐CRM attributes on their site. However only the chat feature, spare parts availability, gift certificate purchase, mailing address, search engine, links, and a company profile were associated with customer satisfaction. No E‐CRM feature was associated with customer traffic to a site. Standard retailers appear to be behind in implementing E‐CRM features in current operations. It is not clear that retailers understand what aspects of E‐CRM will be important in customer satisfaction.

Banks and financial institutions depend upon telephone call centers to meet the needs of a changing and ever more demanding consumer for 24×7 access. Call centers serve as a source of service recovery, added value, market intelligence, and strategic advantage. Despite their ubiquity, there are no studies outlining the determinants of caller satisfaction in the banking call center. This study uses data available from the Purdue University Call Center Benchmark database to determine the critical relationships between call center metrics and caller satisfaction. None of the key factors found to be determinant of customer satisfaction in call centers in other industry groups was found to be significant in bank call centers. This raises questions about how call centers are managed and serves to highlight the very low customer satisfaction that customers have with their banking call center experience.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the explanatory power of the service-profit chain (SPC) model in a context that differs from its original conception. The authors do so by considering whether the main relationships it proposes apply in the context of call centre services, characterised by remote services and cost cutting business models.

The data were gathered from a survey of call centre management with a sample of 937 call centres from 14 countries. The analysis was carried out using structural equation modelling.

Findings reveal that the SPC model behaves somewhat differently in call centres. Although there is general support for most of the links in the model, the results indicate that customer satisfaction in the call centre industry is a separate outcome, rather than a precursor to company performance.

As is common in most research of this type, the present study is based on cross-sectional data.

Managers would be well advised to keep in mind that even minimum investments in human capital can make a difference in customer satisfaction and company results.

This is the first study to examine the main links in the SPC in non-traditional, non-face-to-face services. It demonstrates that the basic logic of the model is upheld, thus providing evidence that the boundaries of the SPC model may be further pushed in line with the peculiarities of the evolving service economy. Also, the authors make a methodological contribution by proposing a series of organisational level proxies for measuring elements of the chain that are typically assessed using individual level data that is expensive to gather.