Two over-arching research questions are examined in this thesis. These questions concern call centre organisational features (dialogue scripting and performance monitoring), work design (e.g., autonomy, workload, role properties) and health outcomes (psychological strain and MSDs) which are examined using data from 1,141 employees taken from 36 call centres. In the Study 1 the "lean service characteristics" of dialogue scripting and performance monitoring are examined in relation to the prediction of call handler job-related strain. Findings confirm that employees who experience greater dialogue scripting and more intensive performance monitoring show higher levels of strain. These relationships are fully mediated by work design. These findings demonstrate the importance of considering the impact of lean working practices on employee health. In the Study 2, the work characteristics of autonomy and workload are examined in relation to the prediction of musculoskeletal disorders (upper back, lower body and arms). I find that the relationship of workload to upper body and lower back musculoskeletal disorders is largely accounted for by job-related strain. This mediating effect is less evident for arm disorders. Contrary to expectation, job autonomy has neither a direct nor a moderating effect on any musculoskeletal disorder. In Study 3, a systematic literature review of intervention studies in call centres is presented. Sixteen papers are categorised into four intervention domains, namely, i) physical work environment ii) ergonomic iii) job design and iv) health. The majority of studies are ergonomic in nature and the physical work environment is considered also. Study 3 implies that whilst work psychologists examining call centre working practices is a valid exercise it only forms part of a psychosocial risk story and that work psychologists need to work in a more interdisciplinary manner if we are to positively intervene in call centres.

Despite the mass of research into customer behaviour and expectations, very little has focused on paid-membership contexts (in which an individual must pay to join an organisation in order to receive the benefits of being a member of that organisation). This research focuses on the measurement of customer service quality in a paid membership organisation, together with the key characteristics of the organisation, its members and the relationship between these factors. However, as a fundamental part of customer service evaluation is the effectiveness of the evaluation instrument itself - current techniques and research regarding their effectiveness are reviewed and compared. Specifically, the SERVQUAL (Parasuraman et al., 1988) technique is documented, and research highlighting conceptual, methodological and interpretative problems is critically reviewed in light of recent advances in service quality measurement and the cognitive psychology of survey responding. On the basis of this review, a new measurement tool is developed and its effectiveness and reliability compared to SERVQUAL. Existing research on membership organisations and relationship marketing is also critically reviewed and discussed with respect to a specific paid membership organisation. The design, development and piloting of a survey specifically designed to evaluate the customer service provision of the particular professional paid membership organisation and the nature of its relationship (and relationship marketing activities) with its members, is then detailed, culminating in a full survey of the organisation's membership. The findings of the survey are critically reviewed and are found to be highly consistent with previous research on relationship marketing in membership organisations. The main conclusions are then critically discussed, together with methodological issues. Finally, directions for further research are considered.

The purpose of this study is to explore the effect of Organisational Culture (OC) on the practice of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) with the aim of developing a greater understanding of how OC may facilitate or impede the practice of CRM. The research purpose is analysed into the following research objectives: 1) to identify employees' and managers' perceptions of CRM, 2) to explore the practice of CRM and its constituents in the organisation, and 3) to explore the effect of OC on the practice of CRM. A longitudinal case study was conducted in a leading firm in the U.K. automotive services sector. The evidence collected from this study covered a variety of sources including a) 36 personal interviews, b) observation, and c) secondary data, such as company documents, press articles, trade publications, and archival data. As far as research objective (1) is concerned, the findings of this research indicate that people who are involved in the practice of CRM acknowledge its value, yet they may also misinterpret and confuse its meaning. With regard to research objective (2), the results of the case study suggest that CRM is an organisation-wide process that contributes to the creation and delivery of superior value to the customer. With reference to research objective (3), the OC of the investigated firm appears to be a multi-faceted construct consisting of different dimensions. Among these, the dimensions of customer orientation, employee orientation and centralisation seem to have a significant effect on the CRM process. Customer orientation and employee orientation facilitate significantly the deployment of CRM initiatives. The findings show that centralisation has mixed impact on the practice of CRM. This thesis contributes to the emerging theory of CRM by offering insights into the interface of CRM and OC, which is an under-explored theme in the literature.

The research interest in multi-variant lean inventory is quite recent and effective general solution methods have yet to be developed. We propose new solution methods to manage multi-variant inventory for a number of scenarios. The mathematical analyses and three theoretical models are developed to calculate the average customer service level for these scenarios.

The contemporary view in marketing literature is that value is a dynamic, subjective process, co-created and defined by the consumer during use (Normann and Ramirez 1993; Holbrook 1994, 1996, 1999; Prahalad 2004; Vargo and Lusch 2004, 2006, 2008; Gronroos 2000, 2008a, 2011). Support for this phenomenological view of value comes from means-end theory (Woodruff and Flint 2006; Vargo and Lusch 2004). Although et great deal of conceptual work supports this view, Woodruff and Flint (2006: 184) believe that "marketing thought is seriously deficient in its understanding of consumer value related phenomena". Thus, the purpose of this thesis is to provide an in-depth understanding of the dynamic, co- created perspective of value in the context of higher education. Based on a review of fragmented but inter-related themes of literature, the paper proposes an extended means-end value framework that incorporates the antecedents and implications of value co-creation and facilitates the understanding of the phenomenologically oriented concept of value. A quasi- longitudinal qualitative study involving semi-structured interviews was employed to examine (1) the goals that guide consumer behaviour, (2) the resources integrated by consumers during goal formation and value co-creation and (3) the value perceptions that the integrated resources link to. The results suggest a shifting pattern in the goals, resources and value perceptions as consumers progress in their relationship with the service provider. The thesis concludes with a discussion of the theoretical implications of the results and directions for future research in this area.

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Call centre staffing is important as the workforce accounts for 60-70% of the total operating cost of a call centre. The staffing procedure involves two distinct but interrelated research areas: a) forecasting the call arrival rates and b) modelling the call centre as queueing system to decide on staffing levels, using the forecast arrival rates. However, while most of the forecasting methods developed assume time-varying arrival rates, the classic Erlang-C based queueing model for staffing assumes stationarity and does not consider the dynamic transient behaviour of the call centre queueing system. In addition, the forecasting models themselves are imperfect and thus have forecast errors, which also affects the performance of the queueing models. This thesis specially designed an experimental framework that mirrors the key elements required by the call centre staffing activity. The framework enables us to conduct a wide range of experiments for analysing the individual, combined and interactive effects of forecasting methods and queueing models for staffing on call centre system performance. We introduce a geometric discrete time modelling (Geo-DTM) approach and use it with an iterative-staffing algorithm (ISA) to determine staffing levels. Empirical tests show that under perfect knowledge of arrival rates, there are many benefits of using the Geo- DTM+ISA method compared to steady-state staffing methods. With simulated call arrivals data, we evaluate the effects of forecasting errors on call centre performance using various forecasting models and the Geo-DTM+ISA for staffing. The results show that even with a good quality dynamic queueing model (Geo- DTM+ISA), better forecasting accuracy does not necessarily translate into better service levels. The system performance exhibited depends on a combination of factors. We also study the combined effects on call centre performance in the likely practical case where both forecasting and queueing models are suboptimal. Our results show that under a quality driven service regime, stationary models perform similarly to Geo-DTM+ISA. However, under an efficiency driven service regime, the stationary based staffing methods perform much worse than Geo-DTM+ISA, although both are affected by forecasting errors. Insights from the empirical results are used to provide guidance for call centre workforce management.

In a time of fast growing technology and communication systems, it is very important for the industry and the corporations to develop new contact centre environment technologies for better customer contact requirements. The integration of contact centre (CC) into day-to-day organisational operations represents one of the most promising trends in the 21 st century economy. Whatever the nature or point of contact, customers want a seamless interaction throughout their experience with the company. Customers receive more personalised experience, while the company itself can now provide a consistent message across all customer interactions. Based on the literature studies and the research carried out within the contact centre industry through the case studies, the author identified the customer and advisor behavioural attributes along with demographic, experience and others that later are used to derive the categories. Clustering technique identified the categories for customers and advisors. From the initial set of categories, fuzzy expert system framework was derived which assigned a customer or advisor with the pre-defined set of categories. The thesis has proposed two novel frameworks for categorisation of customer and advisor within contact centres and development of intelligent decision support framework that displays the right amount of information to the advisor at the right time. Furthermore, the frameworks were validated with qualitative expert judgement from the experts at the contact centres and through a simulation approach. The research has developed a novel Soft Computing based fuzzy logic categorisation framework that categorises customer and advisor on the basis of their demographic, experience and behavioural attributes. The study also identifies the behavioural aspects of customer and advisor within CC environment and on the basis of categorisation framework, assigns each customer and advisor to that of a pre-defined category. The research has also proposed an intelligent decision support framework to identify and display the minimum amount of information required by an advisor to serve the customer in CC environment. The performance of the proposed frameworks is analysed through four case studies. In this way this research proposes a fully tested and validated set of categorisation and information requirement frameworks for dealing with customer and advisor and its challenges. The research also identifies future research directions in the relevant areas.