Customer–Company Identification as the Enabler of Customer Voice Behavior: How Does It Happen?

Abstract

In this study, we define customer voice behavior as a consumer's extra-role communicative behavior of offering suggestions or opinions to enterprises. We classified customer voice behavior into two dimensions: promotive and prohibitive voices. Furthermore, we explored the relationship between customer-company (C-C) identification and customer voice behavior. From a sample of 394 university students who were customers of food delivery services, the results showed that C-C identification was positively related to both promotive and prohibitive voices while felt responsibility for constructive change (FRCC) played a mediating role between C-C identification and both kinds of customer voice behavior. In addition, we found the moderating effects of self-impact, which could strengthen the impacts of FRCC on customer voice behavior and the mediating effects of FRCC. The theoretical and practical implications of this study are also discussed.

Effect of Employee–Customer Interaction Quality on Customers’ Prohibitive Voice Behaviors: Mediating Roles of Customer Trust and Identification

“…Third, the findings of this paper extend the research of Wang and Lang (2019) and find that the quality of customer-employee interaction can improve customers’ prohibitive voice behaviors through customer identification, not just promotive voices. This study supports the positive effects of Grissemann and Stokburger-Sauer (2012) and Ran and Zhou (2020) on the role of customers as “partial employees.” In addition, the results of this research show that customer trust and identification have a positive impact on customers’ prohibitive voice behaviors. This validates the work of Roy et al (2018) and Ran and Zhou (2019 , 2020) and expands its application areas.…”

“…Under the concept of value co-creation, the communication modes between enterprises and customers have changed from one-way delivery to mutual dialog, which implies that enterprises can obtain customer feedback to gain helpful information and resources for improvement ( Payne et al, 2008 ; Zhao et al, 2019 ). Against this background, customer voice behaviors, conceptualized as customers’ extra-role communicative behaviors of proactively expressing their suggestions or opinions to enterprises have received considerable attention to strengthen customer dialogs with enterprises ( Ran and Zhou, 2020 ). Customer voice behaviors present a unique opportunity for enterprises to receive customer feedback, which in turn provides much value for co-creation between customers and enterprises ( Bai et al, 2020 ).…”

“…Third, customer voice behaviors include promotive and prohibitive aspects ( Ran and Zhou, 2020 ), but existing research pays great importance to the former ( Chamberlin et al, 2017 ; Wang and Lang, 2019 ; Hudson et al, 2020 ; Yu et al, 2020 ) while fairly neglecting the latter. Béal and Sabadie (2018) found that psychological ownership stimulates customer voice behaviors.…”

“…The underlying mechanism of customers’ prohibitive voice behaviors are expected to be further explored. Fourth, the role of customer identification in driving customer voice behaviors is examined ( Ran and Zhou, 2019 , 2020 ; Rather et al, 2019 ; Yang and Hao, 2020 ), but the factors that drive customer identification are not considered. Thus, limited managerial implications are provided for the promotion of customer voice behaviors.…”

Public Voice via Social Media: Role in Cooperative Governance during Public Health Emergency

“…Earlier definitions of customer voice are based on customer needs, but with advances in research on employee voice within organizations, scholars have begun to redefine customer voice from the perspective of role orientation. Ran and Zhou clearly define customer voice as the extra-role communication behavior in which customers actively make suggestions or express opinions to improve the status of enterprises; this kind of behavior belongs to the category of customer citizenship behavior [32]. At the dimension level, most previous studies on customer voice divide it into two categories: customer satisfaction and customer complaint [33].…”