When more is less: Field evidence on unintended consequences of multitasking

摘要

Service organizations adopt multitasking policies, and one prominent application of workplace multitasking is the contact center, especially online live chats in which agents regularly shift their attention among different customers. Productivity of agents, especially in live chats, is much more than the throughput of how many customers an agent can handle. Customer satisfaction remains crucial. The article examines how multitasking impacts customer satisfaction in online service live chats. Based on a comprehensive proprietary data set from the call center operations of an S&P 500 tax preparation service firm, the study analyzes the impact of chat agent multitasking. Three important consequences of multitasking are studied: problem resolution rates, in-service delays and customer satisfaction. Multitasking is measured in two different ways: one focusing on the fact that an agent is assigned to multiple customers and the other focusing on an agent actively working with multiple customers. Results show that agents are less likely to resolve customer problems if they are actively engaged in two or more tasks concurrently. Assignment of a new customer alone is sufficient for the agents' responsiveness to decrease, even if the agent is focusing on a single customer. Problem resolution and response delay further lead to a negative impact of multitasking on customer satisfaction. The results were found to be robust to alternative specifications such as heterogeneity among agents, time-varying effects and self-selection bias. In terms of whether such effects are uniform across varying agent workloads and different customer segments, it is found that not all customers have the same degree of intolerance toward multitasking.