Search results

This article has been withdrawn as it was published elsewhere and accidentally duplicated. The original article can be seen here: 10.1108/09564239410057672. When citing the article, please cite: Dwayne D. Gremler, Mary Jo Bitner, Kenneth R. Evans, (1994), “The Internal Service Encounter”, International Journal of Service Industry Management, Vol. 5 Iss: 2, pp. 34 - 56.

This paper aims to examine how external marketing messages, which are generally used to convey company and product information to external target audiences, influence job attitudes and behaviors of salespeople.

The study is conducted based on survey data on 348 salespeople working at regional banks in the Midwestern USA. The relationships among salespeople’s perceptions of marketing messages (i.e. in terms of value incongruence and claim inaccuracy), organizational cynicism, job attitudes (i.e. organizational commitment and job satisfaction) and behaviors (i.e. extra-role performance) are empirically tested.

Salespeople’s perceptions of value incongruence and claim inaccuracy of marketing messages heighten organizational cynicism, which in turn negatively impacts on organizational commitment, job satisfaction and extra-role performance. Also, inaccurate claim directly decreases job attitudes and behaviors.

The results are limited to salespeople in financial institutions, and future research should investigate perceptions of non-customer contact employees in other industry contexts. Future investigation may also include objective performance metrics and consumer satisfaction ratings.

Service firms should strive to align salespeople’s perceptions of marketing messages with firms’ intended goals from those messages.

Drawing on attitude theory and perspectives from sales literature, social psychology and organizational behavior literature, in the first of such investigations, the authors studied the impact of external marketing messages on salespeople’s cynicism, job attitudes and behaviors.

Increasingly companies ask customers to participate in creating and producing services. This research aims to explore the effect that communicating role expectations to customers may have on their processing and evaluation of the encounter.

A dyadic experiment using prototypical customer‐couples and practicing insurance agents was implemented. Couples and agents were randomly assigned to dyads, which were then assigned to one of two conditions – a no‐expectations or an expectations condition. Post‐encounter, couples evaluated service quality and indicated their satisfaction, trust and anticipation of future interaction.

The study found that socialized customers relied more on service quality in evaluating the encounter than did unsocialized customers. However, socialized wives showed decreased trust, satisfaction and anticipation of future interaction than did non‐socialized wives (no significant differences for husbands).

Expectations were simply provided to customers; and these expectations were framed to emphasize the benefits of complying with expectations may mitigate some negative effects of socialization.

While socialized customer outcomes declined, these customers relied more on the service quality elements of the encounter rather than peripheral elements beyond the control of the firm and the service provider. These findings highlight the caution managers must exercise as they juggle the trade‐offs inherent in communicating the customer's expanded role in the service production.

The customer's role in creating and producing service experiences has received increased attention. This research offers evidence that the benefits achieved through increased customer participation have costs to be considered.

The literature is rich with examples that stress the importance of marketers having long‐term customer relationships. Yet, the reality is that while relational attachments can foster benefits, there are many occasions when marketers seek, or are forced, to disband or change the nature of customer relationships. Interestingly however, despite the obviousness of this circumstance, this remains an unexamined strategic condition. In a unique investigation, this article explores the strategic opportunities and conditions that emanate from “relational unrest” in the business‐to‐business marketplace. Consequently, this article notes how sellers can benefit from understanding how to properly manage relational unrest. To address this issue, a strategic framework is proposed, which concludes that when sellers experience relational difficulties, strategic options with positive outcomes and related managerial implications can be associated with this condition.

An internal customer′s (i.e. employee′s) satisfaction with a service firm can be significantly influenced by service encounters experienced with internal service providers. For example, a loan officer′s satisfaction with the bank he/she works for may well be influenced by internal services provided by the data processing group. Introduces the concept of the “internal service encounter” and presents the results of an initial study of internal service encounter satisfaction. The empirical study builds on previous research in using the critical incident methodology to examine internal services in a large US bank. Indicates that internal customers are similar to external customers in that, with a few interesting differences, the same types of events and behaviours distinguish satisfactory and dissatisfactory incidents in both internal and external encounters. Implications for managers and suggestions for future research are also presented.

This study aims to explore how managers of multi-unit retail chains balance unit customer satisfaction and profitability through the manager ' s customer, sales, and production operating orientations.

This research links survey data (gathered from unit managers and customers) to customer satisfaction and unit financial performance.

The study found that the store managers ' customer and sales operating orientations are strongly related to financial performance; further, these effects are negatively moderated by a production operating orientation. Results also indicate that the store manager ' s customer and sales operating orientations are related to customer satisfaction only when moderated by his/her production operating orientation.

Using a sample drawn from within a single firm, this research examines profitability and customer satisfaction at the unit level and identifies the manager of the unit as occupying a key strategic role in the multi-unit enterprise.

The findings highlight the critical role the unit manager of a multi-unit enterprise plays in driving customer satisfaction and unit profitability. Further, the results point to the challenge of managing the production-related responsibilities of the retail enterprise while striving to be sales and/or customer oriented. Implications for management are particularly salient when considering the combined effect of production-sales and production-customer orientations.

This study merges services operations and services marketing theory to explore how conflicting strategic initiatives are implemented at the store level, and how these, in turn, influence unit financial performance and customer satisfaction.

The purpose of this study is to assist practitioners in improving the benefits they receive from trade shows. This study seeks to investigate the behaviour of resource commitment of exhibiting firms and its relationships with market orientation and exhibition performance.

Data were collected at the 2007 Suzhou Circuitex Show, which is held annually in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, China. It is one of the largest international shows for the printed circuit board (PCB) industry. A total of 315 questionnaires were handed out and 185 usable questionnaires were returned.

The results advance the theoretical understanding of the market orientation‐resource commitment behaviour – performance framework within the setting of an industrial trade show. This study finds that market orientation is positively associated with an exhibiting firm's resource commitment behaviour, which in turn has varying influences on the different dimensions of trade show performance.

The cross‐sectional study suggests that different facets of exhibition resource commitment may have distinct effects on several dimensions of trade show performance. Future research should adopt a longitudinal survey and extend this study domain to a broader range of industrial contexts.

The research provides a better understanding of the development process of trade show programmes for practitioners in industrial firms to develop effective exhibition strategies.

This paper fills a significant gap in the literature and offers evidence for the relationships among market orientation, resource commitment behaviour and trade show performance. Furthermore, the current research identifies three aspects of resource commitment behaviour and creates corresponding measures for them.

The purpose of this article is to explore the possible negative asymmetric effects in the impact of service quality on the satisfaction and retention of different customer segments in a professional business services context. Negative asymmetry means that a lower than average service quality evaluation has a stronger effect on customer satisfaction and retention than a higher than average evaluation.

The article provides a survey of 124 business customers of a Midwestern radio advertising services provider, preceded by nine in‐depth interviews with account reps of the advertising firm and two focus groups with business customers.

Along the service quality dimensions – customer satisfaction – retention chain, there are significant negative asymmetric effects and the mediating role of satisfaction varies widely. There are important differences across customer groups: service outcomes are most important determinants of customer satisfaction for large and relatively newer accounts; functional quality dimensions (empathy) are most important factors for small and relatively mature accounts.

Surveying customers of one organization in one industry reduces the generalizability of the findings. The study employed only two segmentation variables, while many other variables could be investigated. The focus is on the asymmetric effects of service quality; other factors, such as costs, were not considered.

Managers should invest resources in improving low performance in the service quality dimensions with strongest impact on customer satisfaction and highest negative asymmetry. The identified segment differences suggest the need to achieve strong results for large accounts and relatively new accounts. The customer relationship is most important for small accounts and relatively mature accounts. Maintaining service reliability is critical for small and new account retention.

This study is a first effort to explore the differences in effects across service quality dimensions and customer segments in a professional business service context. The findings indicate that aggregating customers and the service quality measurement can offer misleading information to managers.

In recent years the importance of market‐related information obtained by the sales force and used in marketing decision making has been recognized, but seldom studied. Where investigations have explored the sales force intelligence‐gathering function, researchers have focused on selected aspects of this activity and generally ignored the overall system in which information collection and transfer take place. This article attempts to satisfy the need for such a system by presenting a model of the sales force intelligence‐gathering function.

Considers the impact of multi‐faceted measures of job satisfaction on customer‐oriented behaviours demonstrated by service providers. Reveals how overall job satisfaction, together with specific satisfaction related to supervision, colleagues, promotion and work are positively related to customer‐orientation, while satisfaction with pay is not of significance in this case. Discusses recommendations for management and suggestions for further research.