Dennis Herhausen

How and when customer feedback influences organizational health

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore how and when customers influence organizational climate and organizational health through their feedback. Based on affective events theory, the authors classify both positive and negative customer feedback (PCF and NCF) as affective work events. The authors expect that these events influence the positive affective climate of an organization and ultimately organizational health, and that the relationships are moderated by empowerment climate. Design/methodology/approach – Structural equation modeling was utilized to analyze survey data obtained from a sample of 178 board members, 80 HR representatives, and 10,953 employees from 80 independent organizations. Findings – The findings support the expected indirect effects. Furthermore, empowerment climate strengthened the impact of PCF on organizational health but does not affect the relationship between NCF and organizational health. Research limitations/implications – The cross-sectional design is a potential limitation of the study. Practical implications – Managers should be aware that customer feedback influences an organization’s emotional climate and organizational health. Based on the results organizations might actively disseminate PCF and establish an empowerment climate. With regard to NCF, managers might consider the potential affective and health-related consequences for employees and organizations. Social implications – Customers are able to contribute to an organization’s positive affective climate and to organizational health if they provide positive feedback to organizations. Originality/value – By providing first insights into the consequences of both PCF and NCF on organizational health, this study opens a new avenue for scientific inquiry of customer influences on employees at the organizational level.

When does customer-oriented leadership pay off? an investigation of frontstage and backstage service teams

The service literature highlights the importance of organizational leaders in creating an organization-wide customer orientation (CO). Yet, some open questions remain regarding this relationship: Are organizational leaders from different hierarchical levels equally effective in creating a CO? Does the functional role of employees affect the importance of certain leaders? More generally, when does customer-oriented leadership really pay off? To address these questions, we investigate how senior managers’ and direct supervisors’ CO affects the CO climate and effectiveness of both frontstage and backstage service teams. Analyzing multisource data from 575 employees and their supervisors from 110 teams in a retail bank, we find that the effect of perceived senior manager CO on team CO climate and team effectiveness is stronger in backstage teams while perceived direct supervisor CO has a greater influence on frontstage teams. Moreover, team CO climate consensus moderates the effect of team CO climate on team effectiveness. These results suggest that, contrary to past theorizing, customer-oriented leadership does not per se increase team CO climate and team effectiveness; rather, the correct coupling of leadership source and degree of customer contact needs to be achieved. Service managers should use these findings and appoint the correct leader to implement CO to make the organization-wide CO diffusion more efficient and effective.

Channel Extension Strategies: The Crucial Roles of Internal Capabilities and Customer Lock-In

This study addresses the important but yet unresolved question of how firms can create competitive advantage from their multichannel marketing strategy. More specifically, the authors investigate the antecedents of channel extension strategies and their performance implications. Results from an empirical study including top managers from 308 firms indicate that in addition to environmental factors, a firms channel expansion is directly related to its strategic channel management capability, and that this capability is more important in turbulent environments. Furthermore the study reveals that firms need an appropriate customer lock-in strategy to benefit from addition of novel channel types or traditional channel expansion.

Websites as Information Hubs: How Informational Channel Integration and Shopping Benefit Density Interact in Steering Customers to the Physical Store

Multichannel retailers aim to steer customers to physical stores in order to increase cross-selling, benefit from higher margins, and offer multisensory experiences. The question of how retailers can steer customers to strategically important channels remains. We propose that retailers may induce customers to switch to physical stores by communicating information about channel integration on their websites and that this explicit communication is influenced by the implicit communication of shopping benefits of which customers and retailers may not be aware. Using a multilevel and multisource approach with field data on 1,479 customers and 104 firms, we find that informational online-to-physical channel integration on a retailer’s website influences customers’ online-to-physical store switching and that the density of concurrently communicated shopping benefits moderates this effect. Our results extend the literature on channel choice and provide implications for retailers regarding how to design websites as information hubs to steer customers to physical stores.

The Impact of Customer Contact on Collective Human Energy in Firms

This article investigates how and when a firm’s level of customer contact influences the collective organizational energy. For this purpose, we bridge the literature on collective human energy at work with the job impact framework and organizational sensemaking processes and argue that a firm’s level of customer contact is positively linked to the collective organizational energy because a high level of customer contact might make the experience of prosocial impact across the firm more likely. However, as prior research at the individual level has indicated that customers could also deplete employees’ energy, we introduce transformational leadership climate as a novel contingency factor for this linkage at the organizational level. We propose that a medium to high transformational leadership climate is necessary to derive positive meaning from customer contact, whereas firms with a low transformational leadership climate do not get energized by customer contact. We tested the proposed moderated mediation model with multilevel modeling and a multisource data set comprising 9,094 employees and 75 key informants in 75 firms. The results support our hypotheses and offer important theoretical contributions for research on collective human energy in organizations and its interplay with customers.

The interplay between employee and firm customer orientation: substitution effect and the contingency role of performance-related rewards

This paper identifies and explains a potential tension between a firms emphasis on customer orientation (CO) and the extent to which employees value CO as a success factor for individual performance. Based on self‐determination theory and CO implementation research, the authors propose that firm CO may represent both autonomous and controlled motivations for CO, but that employees’ CO is more strongly linked to individual performance when employees experience solely autonomous motivation. Hence, the authors expect a substitution effect whereby the link between employees’ CO and their performance is weaker when firm CO is high. Furthermore, the authors examine a boundary condition for the previous hypothesis and propose that performance‐contingent rewards have a positive effect on the internalization of the extrinsic motivation stemming from firm CO. Two multilevel studies with 979 employees and 201 top management team members from 132 firms support these hypotheses. Against previous research, these findings offer a new perspective on the effectiveness of CO initiatives, propose employees’ motivational states as the theoretical explanation for the heterogeneity in the link between employee CO and performance, and reappraise the role of performance‐contingent rewards in CO research. Managerial implications for the effective implementation of customer‐oriented initiatives within firms are provided.

Customer-Driving Marketing: Neue Kundenbedürfnisse wecken

Kundenbedurfnisse verandern sich unabhangig von technologischen Entwicklungen. Diese Veranderungen mussen moglichst fruhzeitig identifiziert und fur das eigene Unternehmen genutzt werden. Doch den meisten Unternehmen gelingt es nicht, sich von den derzeitigen Bedurfnissen ihrer Kunden zu losen: Sie sind „Customer-Driven“. Dieses Verhalten fuhrt zwar zu marginalen Verbesserungen der eigenen Leistungen, kann aber nicht zu wirklichen Innovationen beitragen. Beispiele fur Unternehmen, die trotz hoher Kundenorientierung Veranderungen in den Kundenbedurfnissen versaumt haben, sind der Automobilbauer Ford mit dem „Ford Edsel“, der trotz umfangreicher Kundenbefragungen zum Zeitpunkt seiner Einfuhrung schon veraltet war, oder der Videogigant Blockbuster, der trotz regelmasiger Kundenzufriedenheitsstudien den Trend zum Onlineverleih verpasst hat und in Konkurs gegangen ist. Um langfristigen Erfolg zu haben, sollten Unternehmen neue Ideen nicht mithilfe von bestehenden Kundenbedurfnissen entwickeln, sondern sich an latenten und zukunftigen Kundenbedurfnissen ausrichten –, in anderen Worten, sie sollten neue Bedurfnisse bei den Kunden wecken. Unser Beitrag zeigt funf Prozessschritte auf, wie Unternehmen sich dieser Herausforderung des „Customer-Driving“ stellen konnen. Daruber hinaus werden im Umgang mit neuen Bedurfnissen verschiedene Typen von Unternehmen beschrieben und typengerechte Empfehlungen gegeben.

Social Media als Management-Herausforderung - Ansätze zur erfolgreichen Implementierung von Social Media-Strategien

Social Media erleichtern den direkten Kundenkontakt und eroffnen von der aktiven Beteiligung an Innovationsprozessen uber die Starkung von Kundenbeziehungen bis hin zur digitalen Distribution vielfaltige Optionen fur das Marketing. Gerade fur das Dienstleistungsmanagement bietet der Einsatz einen grosen Mehrwert, da Social Media die Kundenintegration uber die eigentliche Leistungserstellung hinaus ermoglichen (Bruhn/Meffert 2012). Auch die hohe Popularitat von Kommunikationsplattformen wie Facebook oder Twitter bei Onlinenutzern (Busemann/Gscheidle 2012) und niedrige Einstiegsbarrieren haben zur Verbreitung im Dienstleistungsmanagement beigetragen, so dass der Einsatz von Social Media immer mehr zum Standard gehort.