Leveraging the People Factor. Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.6 - 2...

Leveraging the People Factor

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. 6 - 2

Service Employees and Their Behavior

• Why Are Employees So Important?

• Are All Service Employees Equally Important?

• Which Are More Important: Technical Skills or Social Skills?

• Ensuring Employee Excellence


Boundary Spanners

• Boundary spanners (contact personnel)• Frontstage employees who link an

organization with its customers.

• Represent the service in the customers’ eyes.

• Technical skills• Proficiency with which service employees

perform their tasks.

• Social skills• Manner in which service employees interact

with customers and fellow workers.


Firm

Consumer

Boundary Spanner

Drama Aspects:1. Operate the “frontstage”2. Must attend to “personal front”3. Success depends on “performance”

Boundary Spanner Functions:1. Information processing2. External representationBowen and Schneider (1985)

Boundary Spanning:A Representation


Functions of Service Personnel/Actors

• Add tangibility to the service.

• Act as source of information in the commonly ambiguous service situation and help the customer to cognitively frame the service encounter.

• Often perceived as the service itself.

• Customer satisfaction is influenced by the quality of the interpersonal interaction between the customer and the contact employee.


How to Ensure Satisfying Service Encounters Through Employees

• Must possess both "technical" and "social" skills (Davidow and Uttal 1989; Grönroos 1985, 1990).

• Willing and capable of performing the tasks required of them. (Berry and Parasuraman 1991; Schneider and Bowen 1995).

• Amount of effort the customer perceives the service employee expending (Mohr and Bitner 1994).

• Getting them to engage in extra-role performance (Bettencourt and Brown 1993; Organ 1990).


How to Ensure Satisfying Service Encounters Through Employees (cont’d)

• Requires a worker who is empathetic, flexible, and inventive (Henkoff 1994).

• Employees must appear to enjoy their jobs and the customers (Price, Arnould and Tierney 1995), i.e. impression management.


What Should Be Done to Ensure Employee Excellence?

• Hire intelligently

• Train intensively & continuously

• Monitor incessantly

• Reward inspirationally


Internal Marketing

• Policy of treating employees as internal customers of the organization,

• responding to employees' needs or wants, and

• promoting the organization and its policies to the employee.


Empowerment

• The management practice of sharing with frontline employees:• information,

• rewards,

• knowledge, and

• Power

• Allows them to better respond to customers’ needs and expectations.


Benefits of Empowerment

• Quicker responses to customer needs during service delivery.

• Quicker responses to dissatisfied customers during service recovery.

• Greater employee satisfaction with jobs and themselves.

• Employees will act more warmly and enthusiastically with customers.

• Empowered employees are a great source of ideas.

• Great word-of-mouth communication and retention.


Costs of Empowerment

• Greater monetary investment in selection and training.

• Higher labor costs.

• Slower or less consistent service delivery.

• Possible violations of fair play.

• Giveaways and bad decisions.


Definition of Discretionary Effort

• The difference between

• the maximum effort one can bring to a task and

• the minimum effort needed simply to get by.

Leveraging the People Factor. Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.6 - 2...

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