Sterling A. Bone

How Customer Participation in B2B Peer-to-Peer Problem-Solving Communities Influences the Need for Traditional Customer Service

Customer support is critical for the success of business-to-business (B2B) service firms. A key issue such firms face is how to reduce customers’ reliance on traditional support service. B2B companies are increasingly turning to firm hosted virtual peer-to-peer problem-solving (P3) communities to fulfill some of their customer support service needs. This raises the question: Does customer problem-solving participation in such communities reduce the demands associated with traditional customer support service? This research investigates the effects of problem-solving customer participation in a P3 community among global B2B customers. Results reveal that community problem-solving customer participation, in terms of helping oneself (posting questions) and helping others (responding to peer questions), reduces the participant’s use of traditional customer support service. Results show that the frequency of logging in to the community and breadth of community memberships both serve to increase the use of traditional customer support service. This is the first empirical study to investigate the longitudinal effects of problem-solving customer participation in a peer-to-peer problem-solving community of B2B customers. Promoting peer-to-peer customer interactions provides managers with strategic levers to increase the efficiencies and the effectiveness of their support service.

Immigration, culture, and ethnicity in transformative consumer research

Immigration, culture, and ethnicity (IC&E) research has a lengthy history in consumer research, though most research focuses narrowly on identity (and related topics) and has been done at the individual level of analysis. First, the authors discuss the need for research focused on assessing well-being at the collective level and highlight the important role of social networks and communities in improving consumer well-being and creating effective policy interventions. Next, they explore the utility of the emerging intersectionality conceptual framework for research on well-being and IC&E. They offer specific suggestions for designing policy-oriented research using this approach and illustrate the process by taking a well-regarded IC&E study and reimagining its design using a process-centered approach to intersectionality.

‘‘By-the-Book’’ Decision Making: How Service Employee Desire for Decision Latitude Influences Customer Selection Decisions

To reduce adverse customer selection, service firms are empowering employees to use decision latitude to decide whether to provide a service to a potential customer. Customer selection often requires complex decision making that involves both quantitative and qualitative customer information. The authors introduce service employees’ desire for decision latitude (DDL) as an individual difference construct that influences the processing of quantitative and qualitative information in customer selection decisions. Across several studies, the authors find that individual differences in DDL moderate how service personnel synthesize quantitative and qualitative information in customer selection decisions. Service employees who have relatively higher levels of DDL integrate quantitative and qualitative information such that the cues combine interactively. Thus, they may act as though they are going against organizational norms by allowing qualitative information to override organizational decision-making norms. Conversely, low DDL individuals appear to combine both quantitative and qualitative information in a linear pattern to influence customer selection. These results suggest that managers should employ DDL to match employees with customers so that an optimal fit occurs. Managers should examine procedures for how information should be used and provide employees with clearly defined guidelines for how to employ quantitative and qualitative information when making customer selection decisions.

“Mere Measurement Plus”: How Solicitation of Open-Ended Positive Feedback Influences Customer Purchase Behavior

In two studies (a longitudinal field experiment with an established business-to-consumer national chain, and a field experiment with a business-to-business software manufacturer), the authors demonstrate that starting a survey with an open-ended positive solicitation increases customer purchase behavior. Study 1, a longitudinal field experiment, shows that one year after the completion of a survey that began by asking customers what went well during their purchase experience, those customers spent 8.25% more than customers who had completed a survey that did not include the positive solicitation. Study 2 utlizes multiple treatment groups to assess the stepwise gains of solicitation, measurement, and solicitation frame. The results demonstrate (1) a mere solicitation effect, (2) a traditional mere measurement effect, and (3) an additional “mere measurement plus” effect of an open-ended positive solicitation; all effects increased customer spending. Specifically, starting a survey with an open-ended positive solicitation resulted in a 32.88% increase in customer spending relative to a survey with no open-ended positive solicitation. The findings suggest that firms can proactively influence the feedback process. Soliciting open-ended positive feedback can create positively biased memories of an experience; the subsequent expression of those memories in an open-ended feedback format further reinforces them, making them more salient and accessible in guiding future purchase behavior.

Responsibility and Well-Being: Resource Integration Under Responsibilization in Expert Services

Responsibilization, or the shift of functions and risks from providers and producers to consumers, has become an increasingly common policy in service systems and marketplaces (e.g., financial, health, governmental). Because responsibilization is often considered synonymous with consumer agency and well-being, the authors take a transformative service research perspective and draw on resource integration literature to investigate whether responsibilization is truly associated with well-being. The authors focus on expert services, for which responsibilization concerns are particularly salient, and question whether this expanding policy is in the public interest. In the process, they develop a conceptualization of resource integration under responsibilization that includes three levels of actors (consumer, provider, and service system), the identification of structural tensions surrounding resource integration, and three categories of resource-integration practices (access, appropriation, and management) necessary to negotiate responsibilization. The findings have important implications for providers, public and institutional policy makers, and service systems, all of which must pay more active attention to the challenges consumers face in negotiating responsibilization and the resulting well-being outcomes.

Happy Users, Grumpy Bosses: Current Community Engagement Literature and the Impact of Support Engagement in a B2B Setting on User and Upper Management Satisfaction

Managerial interest in facilitating online communities is thriving. We provide an overview of the current literature on community engagement from which we conclude that community engagement is investigated in various settings (in B2B and B2C environments), with various purposes (e.g., product support, brand communities), and shows somewhat mixed outcomes. Also, outcomes of community engagement are always investigated at the individual user level, even in B2B settings. However, in B2B networks there are often multiple layers within one organization, as the individual who uses a community is often distinct from the individual(s) responsible for purchase decisions. In the empirical part of our chapter, we go beyond the individual user by investigating how both users and upper management value the various ways their organization obtains customer support.

Detecting Discrimination in Small Business Lending

With limited financial sophistication, entrepreneurial consumers approach the financial marketplace more like retail financial consumers than business customers. However, the assumption of both legislators and regulators is that business-borrowers are more financially savvy than consumer-borrowers, and thus do not require as broad-reaching protections. This gap between marketplace policy protections and the lived reality of the vast majority of small business entrepreneurs sets the stage for entrepreneurial consumers to fall through the regulatory cracks and sets the stage for possible exploitation and abuse. This situation is potentially exacerbated for minority entrepreneurs who belong to protected classes that are generally more vulnerable to exploitation in the marketplace including the small business lending marketplace. In this paper, we highlight the current state of this policy gap in the marketplace relative to minority entrepreneurial consumers and present a matched-paired mystery shopping study that demonstrates the critical need for reliable, primary data to inform regulatory agencies as they work to implement available protections to ensure equal access to credit within the small business lending marketplace.With limited financial sophistication, entrepreneurial consumers approach the financial marketplace more like retail financial consumers than business customers. However, the assumption of both legislators and regulators is that business-borrowers are more financially savvy than consumer-borrowers, and thus do not require as broad-reaching protections. This gap between marketplace policy protections and the lived reality of the vast majority of small business entrepreneurs sets the stage for entrepreneurial consumers to fall through the regulatory cracks and sets the stage for possible exploitation and abuse. This situation is potentially exacerbated for minority entrepreneurs who belong to protected classes that are generally more vulnerable to exploitation in the marketplace including the small business lending marketplace. In this paper, we highlight the current state of this policy gap in the marketplace relative to minority entrepreneurial consumers and present a matched-paired mystery shopping study that demonstrates the critical need for reliable, primary data to inform regulatory agencies as they work to implement available protections to ensure equal access to credit within the small business lending marketplace.

Suggestions are Welcome: Provider Responses to Unsolicted Advice Feedback

In today’s competitive business landscape many companies are increasingly encouraging customers to take a more active role in producing goods and services. Many researchers have argued that inviting customers to co-produce enhances service quality and satisfaction (Meuter and Bitner 1998). To date, little is known on how a company should respond when a customer voluntarily participates in the production process as an advisor and advocate. A notable phenomenon is the customer’s desire for advocacy that results in the customer volunteering ideas and suggestions to the service provider. From the service provider perspective this trend is exciting, yet equally troublesome, as managers must consider whether to implement a customer’s suggestion, whether to respond, and if so, how to respond without damaging the relationship. Often individual suggestions disappear in a black hole and the advice-giver receives no acknowledgement that the organization values their efforts. The marketing literature has not addressed the importance of advice acknowledgement and ways to negate repercussions of not implementing customer advice. Prior research has examined the impact of acknowledging customer complaints and compliments on customer attitudes (Bone et al. 2009).