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The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature of complaint satisfaction, specifically to examine how contact employees should behave and which qualities they should possess. The study also aims to explore the comparability of results obtained from two laddering methods, as the alternative techniques may lead to different sets of attributes.

An exploratory study using the means‐end approach and two laddering techniques (personal interviews and questionnaires) was conducted.

While the personal interviews produced more depth in understanding, the results of the two laddering methods are broadly similar. The research indicates that being taken seriously in the complaint encounter and the employee's listening skills and competence are particularly important.

Owing to the exploratory nature of the study and the scope and size of its student sample, the results outlined are tentative in nature.

If companies know what customers expect, contact employees may be trained to adapt their behavior to their customers' underlying expectations, which should have a positive impact on customer satisfaction. For this purpose, the paper gives suggestions to managers to improve active complaint management.

The study was the first to successfully apply the means‐end approach and two laddering techniques to the issue of complaint satisfaction. The paper has hopefully opened up an area of research and methodology that could reap considerable further benefits for researchers interested in the area of customer complaint satisfaction.

Current relationship marketing literature has stressed the importance of building customer‐employee bonds. These efforts sometimes result in customer‐employee relationships that overwhelm or supersede the customer‐firm relationships. Previous studies report that such an imbalance weakens the firm's position with the customer. Very little research has investigated what factors contribute to the imbalance and its consequences for the firm's relationship with the customer. This research aims to look at customer relationship quality (RQ) imbalance, specifically the imbalance that favors the employee, and identifies six factors as important antecedents. Also studied are the customers' cognitive and emotional reactions to the termination of the customer‐employee relationship when RQ imbalance favors the employee.

In total, 780 customer‐employee pairs from 72 service firms were surveyed using a structured questionnaire.

Analyses of variance (ANOVA) revealed significant group difference along all six antecedents and three consequences.

The findings of this study suggest that imbalanced customer relationships might be prevented, or at least predicted, if the causes of such relationship structure are better understood.

Service organizations should be aware of the negative consequences of imbalanced customer relationships and take necessary caution in their company policies in order to eliminate the negative consequences of imbalanced customer relationships.

This study is the first quantitative inquiry into imbalanced customer relationship issues, which are extremely important in the services industry. Thus, it enhances the literature on services management.

The purpose of this research is to examine how service enablers such as resource management and human resource management practices, identified in prior research as vital, influence both conformance quality and productivity performance. The paper also aims to study how the level of customer contact, a major service differentiator, could moderate the influence of such practices on performance.

Using sample data from 249 service firms in China, hierarchical a regression analyses is employed to test the research questions.

The results indicate that there are common resource management and human resource management practices that positively affect both conformance quality and productivity. Importantly, besides its direct and positive effect on conformance quality and on productivity performance, the level of customer contact was found to have a contingency effect on the relationships between resource management or human resource management practices, and conformance quality or productivity performance.

Future research should consider including other developing countries, more service industries, and a longitudinal study if possible.

Implications of the findings on theory in services and managerial practice in the context of China are offered.

The theoretical value of the research lies in identifying the factors that simultaneously affect both conformance quality and productivity (which are often seen as competing goals) in service sectors, and their dependency on the level of customer contact.

Employee learning is imperative in the dynamic service environment; yet, much is still unknown about its strategic importance. The purpose of this paper is to extend the understanding of learning by focusing on the strategic importance of learning goal orientation (LGO) in customer-contact employees in service industries characterized with high customer contact.

This paper adopts the multi-method approach by conducting two studies in the high-contact service sector. Study 1 is a large-scale, multiple-respondent survey that investigates the associations between LGO and its antecedents and performance outcomes. To supplement study 1, study 2 embraces case studies that identify the managerial supportive practices and outcomes of customer-contact employees’ learning behaviors.

The results of study 1 demonstrate that employees’ affective organizational commitment does not yield higher-quality services unless the service employees are learning oriented. The findings of study 1 also indicate that management commitment to service quality has positive effects on both LGO and affective organizational commitment. In study 2, the results reveal the practical methods that managers can employ to effectively promote such activities.

This research offers novel insights into research on learning by showing the strategic importance of LGO to enhancing high-contact service firms’ performance and the practical means of fostering LGO in customer-contact employees.

Employees’ emotional competencies (EEC) are skills, based on emotional intelligence, used to perceive, understand and regulate customer emotions during a service encounter. In the context of service recovery, these skills are especially important and allow employees to influence consumers’ attitude and behaviours. The purpose of this study is to assess the direct and indirect impacts of EEC in post-recovery satisfaction, trust, word-of-mouth and repurchase intention, considering the moderating role of service (level of employee-customer contact) types.

A total of 355 customers who experienced a service failure and subsequent recovery were surveyed using a self-administered questionnaire. EEC was specified as a formative construct, determined by its perceiving, understanding and regulating dimensions. To measure EEC and its impact on selected outcomes, PLS-SEM was used. A multi-group analysis was performed to analyse the moderating role of service type.

Results confirm EEC as a formative construct, with a positive direct impact on post-recovery satisfaction, particularly in high-contact customized services. Findings also reveal the mediating role of satisfaction on selected outcomes, and the significant direct impact of EEC on trust, even when controlling for satisfaction.

EEC remains unexplored in the service recovery literature, and most research fails to understand how EEC role may vary given contextual differences. This study adopts a consumer perspective of EEC in the emotionally charged situation of service recovery, considering the moderating role of service type. The authors further contribute to both literature streams while examining the impact of EEC on post-recovery evaluations. Companies should consider these findings in the recruitment and training of front-line employees to develop better service recovery strategies.

The purpose of the current research is to evaluate how customer contact level and customer service-based role conflict influence the relationship between customer emotions and work engagement, while simultaneously evaluating psychological capital as an outcome of work engagement. Customer service research highlights the impact of employee attitudes and behaviors on customer satisfaction. More recently, this relationship has been examined in reverse, evaluating how customer emotions influence the employee. Unfortunately, previous research has not evaluated variables that inhibit the impact of customer emotions on the employee.

Data were collected from frontline employees across high and low customer contact service contexts. The hypothesized relationships were tested using structural equation modeling.

This research provides empirical evidence that employee-perceived customer delight impacts employee work engagement. However, through a process of feedback, customer service-based role conflict impacts the relationship between customer emotions and employee emotions. Finally, the conceptual model illustrates how engaged employees can create their own personal resources vis-à-vis the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions.

This research identifies both antecedent and outcomes variables associated with work engagement, as well as identified mediating factors.

Results suggest that the quality and level of contact that frontline employees have with customers impact their work engagement. Furthermore, engaged frontline employees have the ability to create their own personal resources.

This research makes contributions to the understanding of the impact of positive customer emotions on frontline employees.

This paper examines several sources of support for contact employees in service encounters. These sources of support, including organization support, supervisory support, and customer's participation, are proposed to affect the attitudes and behaviors of employees, and consequently affect customer's perceptions of employees' service quality. This study, which combines perceptions from customers and their contact employees, shows that three sources of support for employees contribute significantly to job satisfaction and employee service quality, while perceived organizational support and customer participation affect service effort. Also, the empirical results indicate that both employee service effort and job satisfaction play strong, central roles in determining customers' perceptions of employee service quality. They were found to be effective mediators linking employees' cognitive appraisal of various sources of support to service quality.

Grounded in ethical decision-making theory, this paper aims to develop and empirically tests a model that examines the relationships between ethical leadership, customer orientation, ethical values person-organization fit, commitment to service quality and service sabotage among customer-contact service employees in the lodging industry.

Data were electronically collected from a national survey of 316 hotel/motel customer-contact employees.

Results revealed that perceived ethical leadership behavior is positively related to customer orientation, ethical values person-organization fit and commitment to service quality. Customer orientation is positively related to commitment to service quality and mediates the relationship between ethical leadership and service sabotage. Ethical values person-organization fit mediates the relationship between ethical leadership and service sabotage.

The study is cross-sectional, limited to customer-contact employees in lodging settings and examines merely the employee perspective.

Lodging leaders can benefit significantly in many areas by practicing ethical leadership. For example, service sabotage behaviors can be reduced indirectly by aligning the customer-contact employees’ ethical values with those of the organization, as well as when this employee is customer-oriented. An ethical leadership style also can positively influence customer-contact employees’ customer orientation and increase their commitment to service quality. Lodging properties must hire and cultivate managers and supervisors with ethical values.

This research helps to better understand leadership behaviors useful for improving the ethical conduct and performance of customer-contact employees in the lodging industry, while simultaneously improving their commitment to service quality and guest-oriented behavior.

An inter‐disciplinary approach is adopted to provide a deeper understanding of the human resource‐service quality relationship. The paper tests the relationships organisational commitment and job satisfaction have with service quality of customer‐contact employees. Hypotheses are constructed by reviewing literature in the areas of human resource management and services marketing. A study comprising 342 employees was conducted in four telephone call centres of a major UK retail bank. Investigates how different forms of organisational commitment and job satisfaction influence the service quality delivered by contact employees. Findings indicate that job satisfaction and organisational commitment of employees have a significant impact on service quality delivered. The affective component of commitment was found to be more important than job satisfaction in determining service quality of customer‐contact employees.

This paper aims to propose and test a conceptual model, guided by conservation of resources theory, that examines whether emotional exhaustion is a mediator between organization mission fulfillment and critical outcomes such as turnover intentions, lateness attitude, job performance and extra-role customer service.

The aforesaid relationships were assessed via data gathered from customer-contact employees two weeks apart in three waves and their immediate supervisors in the international five-star chain hotels in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. The relationships in the model were gauged via structural equation modeling.

The results reveal that organization mission fulfillment influences the above-mentioned outcomes only through emotional exhaustion. Specifically, organization mission fulfillment mitigates customer-contact employees’ emotional exhaustion. Under these circumstances, these employees report desirable outcomes such as low levels of quitting intentions and lateness attitude as well as higher in- and extra-role performances.

In future research, collecting data from different service settings in different countries would enable the researcher to conduct a cross-national study and make further generalizations. In future research, including actual turnover and absenteeism as well creative and service recovery performances in the model would enrich the understanding about the outcomes of organization mission fulfillment and emotional exhaustion.

Management needs to use several intra-organizational communication tools so that customer-contact employees can have an understanding of how the organization is trying to accomplish its mission. When employees participate in and contribute to the preparation of the organization’s mission statement, they own the mission statement and do their best to achieve the organizational objectives. Management should also offer a work environment where employees can avail themselves of psychosocial support to be provided by mentors. Such psychosocial support would enable employees to manage problems emerging from emotional exhaustion.

This paper contributes to current knowledge by testing the effect of the organization’s fidelity to its mission statement on emotional exhaustion and the above-mentioned job outcomes using data obtained from employees in frontline service jobs in the hotel industry.