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This paper uses practice theory to strengthen the theoretical relationship between customer engagement (CE) and value cocreation (VCC), thereby demonstrating how customers may become engaged and remain engaged through VCC practices.

The study adopts a problematization approach to identify shared assumptions evident in service-dominant logic (SDL) and CE research. Practice theory, as a higher-order perspective, is used to integrate the iterative and cyclical processes of VCC and CE, specifically through the theoretical mechanism of habitus.

Habitus acts as a customer value lens and provides a bridging concept to demonstrate how VCC and CE are joined via sensemaking processes. These processes determine how customers perceive, assess, and evaluate value, how they become engaged through VCC, and how their experience of engagement may lead to further VCC practice. The temporally bound experiences, states, and episodes are accumulated and aggregated through an enduring customer value lens comprised of habituated dispositions, interests, and attitudes.

This work responds to calls for research to strengthen the theoretical link between VCC and CE and to take account of customers' lived realities and their contextualized experiences. A key suggestion for future research is the use of a rope metaphor to stimulate thinking about the complex, temporally unfolding, and interrelated processes of VCC and CE.

The customer value lens and CE rope are introduced to simplify the complex, abstract, theoretical research on VCC and CE for a nonacademic audience. To understand how customers' value lenses are formed and change, and how a CE rope is strengthened, firms, service designers, and practitioners need to understand sensemaking processes through customer narratives and to use platforms and feedback to support and trigger sensemaking.

This paper provides a theoretical mechanism to explain the iterative and cyclical nature of VCC and CE processes and how accumulation and aggregation occur in these processes. In doing so, it demonstrates that CE occurs by virtue of, and is typified by, sensemaking processes that reproduce and shape a customer's habituated value lens, which perceives, assesses, and determines VCC and thus provides a basis for further customer engagement.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the existing conceptualisation of quantity and quality in call centres as conflicting or contradictory, and through qualitative analysis, demonstrate that quantity and quality may not necessarily operate as a trade-off.

Existing literature is reviewed to show how quantity-quality has been conceptualised to date, followed by an analysis of quantity-quality manifestations based upon an in-depth field study of work and service in a large and complex call centre operation. Advisors’ work practices were observed during their interactions with customers, which provided rich insights into the nature of live calls and service provision in 13 different teams, supplemented with informal semi-structured interviews with team managers, coaches, and centre managers.

The paper demonstrates that quantity and quality operate as a trade-off when the unit of analysis is the individual advisor or individual call fragment. However, if the entire customer enquiry is examined, quantity and quality are manifest differently: emphasising quality may also simultaneously support efficiency; favouring quantity may not only undermine quality but also ultimately circumvent efficiency gains.

The paper is based upon a single case study so further research is required to investigate whether findings concerning quantity-quality are manifest in other call centres, particularly of differing size and complexity.

Call centre management must recognise the negative consequences of focusing upon quantity, the potential benefits of instead emphasising quality, and also acknowledge the limitations of conventional quantitative and qualitative measures. Management should also consider attempting to foster and improve relations between teams and functions within call centres.

The paper provides a qualitative study of quantity and quality in call centres. Quantity and quality are examined beyond the conventional unit of analysis of the individual advisor or call, to explicate interdependence between past, current, and future actions and events involved in customer enquiries. Thus, quantity and quality are analysed in terms of the immediate focus during call handling and the longer run consequences for the efficiency and effectiveness of service provided by the call centre operation.