مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد تاثیرات صلاحیت کارکنان بر رضایت مشتری – الزویر ۲۰۲۰

This article aims to analyze whether the effectiveness of frontline employees’ competences (task and interaction) at managing customer satisfaction with the store differ depending on situational circumstances, specifically, on type of query (consultation vs. assistance) and store crowding. A qualitative study was used to investigate the importance of these two situational circumstances in sales encounters. Subsequently, the hypotheses were tested by a quantitative study based on a survey of 575 customers about their shopping experience. The findings indicate that the effect of frontline employees’ task competence on customer satisfaction increases when the store is crowded, while the effect of interaction competence is stronger in relation to consultation queries than to assistance queries. Important theoretical and practical implications for frontline employees and store managers are outlined.

Introduction

Customer experience management entails analyzing each encounter between the customer and the firm (Vorhees et al., 2017). Managers have started to monitor these encounters as a means by which to provide their customers with outstanding experiences that translate into favorable consumer outcomes and behavior, such as satisfaction, purchase intention, and loyalty (Lemon and Verhoef, 2016). Previous research on service encounters in retailing has focused particularly on customers’ interactions with employees, other customers, atmospherics, and technology (Bowen and Schneider, 2014; Vorhees et al., 2017). Customer–employee contacts, also known as sales encounters, are critical encounters that have a significant impact on clients’ impressions of the retailer and of the brand, largely determine perceived service quality, and influence consumption behavior (Söderlund, 2016; Jha et al., 2017; Söderlund et al., 2018). Despite the importance of the online channel and the inclusion of information technologies in physical stores, mainly self-checkouts, frontline employees “are still the service” (Zeithaml et al., 2009, p. 352) of retail companies and key to the success of the company (Cadwallader et al., 2010). The online channel and self-checkouts are options that can enrich the retailers’ frontline service and help create shopping value (Pantano and Migliarese, 2014; Verhagen et al., 2019). However, they do not replace employees; in fact, they become even more important to determining customer satisfaction when self-checkouts fail (Fernández-Sabiote and Román, 2016). In addition, shoppers still value the frontline employees’ service because of the interaction and trustworthiness that they offer (Riquelme et al., 2016; Larivière et al., 2017; Lee, 2017).