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As consumer debt can substantially impair subjective well-being, it is crucial for research to gain insights into how consumers can be motivated to improve financial planning. This paper aims to investigate how frontline employees in financial services can help consumers regulate their financial planning behaviors and how financial service providers can effectively support their frontline employees in this effort through leadership and organizational climate.

We incorporate regulatory focus theory and conservation of resource theory to develop a conceptual model that we test in a triadic study with a unique dataset collected from consumers, frontline employees, and managers in the banking sector.

We find that frontline employees must pay attention to the details of consumers’ needs and customize the service to those needs to trigger consumer promotion focus and stimulate consumers’ financial planning behaviors. Moreover, our results emphasize that the organization must act as an integrated entity. Thus, a manager’s servant leadership and an organizational climate of customer stewardship are crucial for frontline employees to transform consumers’ financial planning behaviors.

The study highlights frontline employees’ key role in motivating consumer financial planning behavior, offering a new perspective in transformative service research on enhancing financial well-being.

The findings provide financial service providers with actionable implications for enhancing consumers’ financial planning. This benefits both consumers and financial institutions, as customers with greater spending power can buy more financial products.

This study advances transformative service research on consumer financial planning behavior, which has largely focused on consumer-related or society-level variables, by exploring the role of frontline employees and organizational support in terms of leadership and climate.

The impact of frontline robots (FLRs) on customer orientation perceptions remains unclear. This is remarkable because customers may associate FLRs with standardization and cost-cutting, such that they may not fit firms that aim to be customer oriented.

In four experiments, data are collected from customers interacting with frontline employees (FLEs) and FLRs in different settings.

FLEs are perceived as more customer-oriented than FLRs due to higher competence and warmth evaluations. A relational interaction style attenuates the difference in perceived competence between FLRs and FLEs. These agents are also perceived as more similar in competence and warmth when FLRs participate in the customer journey's information and negotiation stages. Switching from FLE to FLR in the journey harms FLR evaluations.

The authors recommend firms to place FLRs only in the negotiation stage or in both the information and negotiation stages of the customer journey. Still then customers should not transition from employees to robots (vice versa does no harm). Firms should ensure that FLRs utilize a relational style when interacting with customers for optimal effects.

The authors bridge the FLR and sales/marketing literature by drawing on social cognition theory. The authors also identify the product categories for which customers are willing to negotiate with an FLR. Broadly speaking, this study’s findings underline that customers perceive robots as having agency (i.e. the mental capacity for acting with intentionality) and, just as humans, can be customer-oriented.

Lawler (2001) posits that social exchanges create a sense of shared responsibility for outcome success. The purpose of this study is to apply this framework to the vendor/frontline employee/customer triad to examine the underlying role of emotions in how frontline employees’ evaluations of vendors and customers trigger and temper brand advocacy efforts, respectively.

With cross-sectional data from 168 frontline employees working at a leading national retailer of electronic goods, path analysis is used to evaluate the hypotheses.

Frontline employees’ relationship quality with the vendor and perceptions of vendors’ product quality positively influence brand advocacy. Also, customers’ brand affinity and recommendation preference both demonstrate a significant, negative curvilinear relationship with brand advocacy.

Frontline employees’ emotion-laden evaluations of vendors and customer influence brand advocacy in different ways. Vendor relationship quality and brand quality perceptions “trigger” brand advocacy. However, customer’s affinity toward a vendor’s brand and willingness to seek recommendations “temper” brand advocacy. Specifically, brand advocacy effort is low when customers possess very low and very high affinity toward a focal brand – moderate affinity spurs high advocacy; likewise, advocacy is low when customers demonstrate very low and very high interest in seeking the frontline employees’ opinion – moderate interest spurs high advocacy. Although ideal to examine vendor and customer emotional exchanges, using only frontline employee data from a technology-selling retailer may constrain generalizability.

Frontline employee training programs should emphasize the customer’s role in the transaction to increase perceptions of shared responsibility, as a means to create a favorable emotional experience, and accentuate timing strategies on when to pursue heightened or diminished emotionally charged brand advocacy efforts.

This study contributes to the frontline employee behavior literature by viewing shared responsibility in transactions as a source of emotional value, explaining variance in frontline employee brand advocacy through relationship and product quality dimensions, and uncovering curvilinear effects for customers’ brand affinity and recommendation preference in elucidating brand advocacy.

This study aims to investigate the affordances of service robots (SRs) in hotels and their effects on frontline employees (FLEs).

Purposive and referral samplings methods were used to conduct 28 semistructured interviews with hotel FLEs, and the transcribed manuscript was analyzed based on grounded theory.

The study identifies six dimensions of SR affordances: physical, sensory, task, safety, social and emotional affordances. The main effects of SR affordances on FLEs involve reducing work stress and mental fatigue and increasing positive emotions in the psychological aspects of FLEs. In terms of behavioral aspects, shifts in task priorities and enhancements in SR usage behaviors were observed. Accordingly, a mechanistic framework was revealed through which SR affordances influence FLEs via direct and indirect interactions between FLEs and SRs.

This paper expands robotics research from a supply-side perspective and is one of the few studies to investigate SR affordances in the field of hospitality research. Findings of this study provide practical guidelines for designing and implementing SRs to support hotel FLEs in their daily work.

本研究旨在调查酒店中服务机器人（SR）的可供性及其对一线员工（FLEs）的影响。

本研究采用目的性和推荐抽样方法, 对酒店一线员工进行了28次半结构化访谈, 并根据扎根理论对转录的手稿进行了分析。

本研究确定了服务机器人的六个可供性维度：物理、感官、任务、安全、社会和情感可供性。服务机器人可供性对一线员工的主要影响包括减少工作压力和心理疲劳, 以及在心理方面增加积极情绪。在行为方面, 观察到任务优先级的变化和服务机器人使用行为的增强。因此, 研究揭示了一种机制框架, 通过一线员工与服务机器人的直接和间接互动, 服务机器人可供性影响一线员工。

本文从供给侧视角扩展了机器人研究, 是少数几篇研究酒店业中服务机器人可供性的研究之一。本研究结果为设计和实施服务机器人以支持酒店一线员工的日常工作提供了实践指南。

The purpose of this study is to explore the capacity of frontline employees (FLEs) to provide insights into customer-to-customer interaction (CCI) and its management in service organisations.

This exploratory study used focus groups and semi-structured in-depth interviews with FLEs to investigate their experiences and reflections in dealing with CCI in a complex service setting in the UK.

FLEs are able to recall CCI encounters, both positive (PCCI) and negative (NCCI), with ease. They are capable of conceptualising and exploring complex nuances surrounding CCI encounters. FLEs can distinguish levels of seriousness of negative CCI and variations in customer sensitivity to CCI. FLEs vary in their comfort in intervening in negative CCI situations. Whilst FLEs draw on skills imparted in an employee-customer interaction context, they would benefit from CCI-specific training. Propositions are advanced for further empirical testing.

The authors studied FLE views on CCI in a customer-centric service organisation in the UK. Future research should further address the FLE perspective on CCI in less service-driven organisations and in other countries. A wide range of themes for further research are proposed.

The insights presented will assist service managers to assess the CCI context of their own organisation and develop strategies and guidelines to support FLEs in detecting, understanding and responding to CCI encounters.

The paper highlights and discusses the complexity of intervening in negative CCI encounters in socially inclusive service environments.

Based on FLE-derived perceptions of CCI, the paper contributes conceptually to CCI knowledge by identifying the existence of “concealed CCI”, distinguishing between gradual and sudden CCI intervention contexts and exploring the human resource development consequences of this distinction, with original implications for service management. The study also contributes to extending the scope of research into triadic service interactions.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of store managers’ employee climate perceptions on frontline employee (FLE), customer and store performance outcomes in the small-store setting.

This study derives the findings from a multi-source data set acquired in partnership with a North American-based retailer that includes survey responses from 1,133 store managers, 5,591 FLEs and 16,488 customers. This paper matches survey responses to corporate records and store sales and operations data.

This study finds that store managers’ employee climate perceptions affect FLEs both directly and indirectly, through store manager social support behaviors. This paper tests the boundary conditions for these findings by examining the moderating effects of store-level FLE tenure heterogeneity and competitive intensity. Study results provide partial support for the hypothesized relationships with regard to FLE tenure heterogeneity, but not competitive intensity.

This research is subject to many of the limitations common to a survey-based study. While the use of one retailer provided opportunities to examine store-level performance data, future research would benefit by using a more expansive data set spanning several companies and industries. Moreover, as the current study was set in the small-store setting, future research should explore how store managers’ influence fluctuates depending on store size and the mechanisms through which organizational priorities flow through other management levels (e.g. department managers) in large retailers.

Study results provide managerial guidance regarding the implementation of an employee climate for the delivery of an enhanced customer experience and superior financial performance.

Although researchers have paid considerable attention to employees’ psychological and organizational climate perceptions, this study makes a unique contribution by examining the effects of store managers’ employee climate perceptions on FLE, customer and store-level outcomes.

Big data analytics (BDA) helps service providers with customer insights and competitive information. It also empowers customers with insights about the relative merits of competing services. The purpose of this paper is to address the research question, “How does big data analytics enable frontline employees (FLEs) in effective service delivery?”

The research develops schemas to visualise service contexts that potentially benefit from BDA, based on the literature drawn from BDA and FLEs streams.

The business drivers for BDA and its level of maturity vary across firms. The primary thrust for BDA is to gain customer insights, resource optimisation and efficient operations. Innovative FLEs operating in knowledge intensive and customisable settings may realise greater value co-creation.

There exists a considerable knowledge gap in enabling the FLEs with BDA tools. Managers need to train, orient and empower FLEs to collaborate and create value with customer interactions. Service-dominant logic posits that skill asymmetry is the reason for service. So, providers need to enhance skill levels of FLEs continually. Providers also need to focus on market sensing and customer linking abilities of FLEs.

Both firms and customers need to be aware of privacy and ethical concerns associated with BDA.

Knitting the BDA and FLEs research streams, the paper analyses the impact of BDA on service. The research by developing service typology portrays its interplay with the typologies of FLEs and BDA. The framework portrays the service contexts in which BD has major impact. Looking further into the future, the discussion raises prominent questions for the discipline.

Service robots have increasingly been utilized in retail settings, yet empirical research on how frontline employees (FLEs) might deal with this new reality remains scarce. This mixed-methods study aims to examine how FLEs expect physical service robots to impact job characteristics and affect their job engagement and well-being.

First, explorative interviews (Study 1; N = 32) were conducted to investigate how FLEs currently experience job characteristics and how they believe robots might impact these job characteristics and job outcomes. Next, a survey (Study 2; N = 165) examined the relationship between job characteristics that retail FLEs expect to be impacted by robots and their own well-being and job engagement.

While the overall expectations for working with robots are mixed, retail FLEs expect that working with robots can alleviate certain job demands, but robots cannot help to replenish their job resources. On the contrary, most retail FLEs expect the pains and gains associated with robots in the workspace to cancel each other out, leaving their job engagement and well-being unaffected. However, of the FLEs that do anticipate that robots might have some impact on their well-being and job engagement, the majority expect negative effects.

This study is unique in addressing the trade-off between expected benefits and costs inherent to job demands-resources (JD-R) theory while incorporating a transformative service research (TSR) lens. By integrating different streams of research to study retail FLEs' expectations about working with robots and focusing on robots' impact on job engagement and well-being, this study offers new insights for theory and practice.

Customer value creation is dependent on a firm’s capacity to fulfil its brand promises and value propositions. The purpose of this paper is to explore frontline employees’ (FLEs’) motivation to align with value propositions.

The paper explores FLEs’ motivation to align with a firm’s value propositions as operationalised brand promises. A longitudinal, three-phase case study was conducted on a business-to-business company in the building and technical trade sector.

This study reveals factors that foster and weaken employees’ motivation to align with a firm’s brand promises and value propositions. The findings show that co-activity and authentic, practice-driven promises and value propositions foster FLEs’ motivation to uphold brand promises and value propositions, whereas an objectifying stance and power struggle weaken their motivation.

The study indicates that a bottom-up approach to strategising is needed and that FLE is to be engaged in traditional managerial domains, such as in developing value propositions. By creating space and agency for FLE in the strategising process, their motivation to align with value propositions is fostered. Four motivational modes are suggested to support bottom-up strategising.

The paper is unique in its focus on FLEs’ motivation. Developing value propositions traditionally falls within the domain of management strategising, while employees are ascribed the role of enactment. Contrary to the established norm, this paper highlights employees’ active role in strategising and developing value propositions.

This paper aims to investigate the influence of individual customer characteristics on frontline employees’ (FLEs) customer need knowledge (CNK), a construct that objectively measures FLEs’ ability to accurately identify a given customer’s hierarchy of needs.

The study uses hierarchical data involving the customer and bank advisor levels in the banking sector of three European countries. The matched sample consisted of 1,166 customers and 332 employees. To account for the nested structure of the data, the study used hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) using HLM software.

The results show that customers’ financial experience and risk aversion positively influence CNK and customer-perceived responsibility for the service outcome negatively impacts CNK. The results further show the impact of individual customer cultural values on CNK, which can be influenced by customer-oriented employee training. Cross-level interaction effects indicate that training measures can reverse negative influences of customers’ high power distance and uncertainty avoidance on CNK, whereas for customers characterized by high long-term orientations, training measures can backfire.

This study contributes to research on the antecedents of FLEs’ CNK by examining the currently overlooked influence of individual customer characteristics that are pertinent to the employee–customer interaction process. The study reveals customer characteristics as a new area of antecedents influencing FLEs’ accurate perceptions of customer needs.