wage rates and the use of ‘high-cost’ sophisticated human resources practices) (Holman et al.

,
2007). Outsourced call centers provide service through the phone line; as a result, customers
do not see that the agent they are working with is not a full representative of the user
company. Any costs incurred during the service provided by the call center (waiting cost,
abandonment cost, loss of goodwill from unsatisfactory service) will be imposed upon the user
company (Ren & Zhou, 2008). As call centers are in many ways the public face of a firm, poor
service can have a significant impact on an organization’s reputation (Milner & Olsen, 2008;
Ren & Zhou, 2008). Outsourcing may pose as a risk for companies, as control over the quality
of operations may be limited. The service quality of call centers must be taken into account
and carefully managed by the user company, as it is vital to the user company’s profitability
(Ren and Zhou, 2008). When a user company outsources its call center operations to an
outside company, an outsourcing supply chain is formed. Ren & Zhou (2008) suggested that
collaboration is essential to achieve coordination. Companies establish service-level
agreements with their outsourced centers to dictate terms by which a call center will be
measured (Milner & Olsen, 2008); this ensures for quality control within subcontracted
activities. This may be maintained through close supervision of the operations of
subcontractors (Holman et al., 2007). Service-level agreements as described by literature on
outsourcing services in relation to quality management includes the following. Service-level
contract 80/20 rule. 80% of customers must be served within 20 seconds. Failure to meet
terms for these contracts would result in a rebate to the contract customer of credit for future
service. Milner & Olsen (2004) refers to this type as timespecific contract, where customers
have been guaranteed that delay does not exceed some fixed time more than some given
percentile of time, as delay-percentile contract. Alternatively, a contract may specify several
different percentiles of delay. For example, a