Empathic Relationships in Professional Services and the Moderating Role of Relationship Age

Abstract

Empathy has been identified as a key success factor for employees who interact with customers. Despite its overall relevance, only a few studies have acknowledged its multidimensional nature. Knowledge remains scarce about the relative impact of cognitive and affective empathy on relational outcomes. In addition, few pieces of research have explicitly acknowledged empathy as theorized within stage‐models focusing on the communication of empathy. The authors conceptualize empathy as a multidimensional construct perceived by the client. Empathy has to be communicated to be effective, while customers’ perceptions of empathy may also be more complex as they distinguish between cognitive and affective empathy. This article investigates the effects of perspective taking, emotional concern, and emotional contagion on trust and commitment. Drawing upon relationship stage concepts, the authors further argue that the influence is moderated by relationship age. Finally, this study investigates if employees benefit from being perceived as empathic partners in terms of “hard facts” (objective sales performance). Based on a data set from 215 business clients of a large consulting firm, this study adopts a structural equation modeling (SEM) approach by using multigroup analysis. To test the empathy–performance link, the authors aggregate customer responses nested in 84 employees and link perceived empathy with performance data. The results show that within B2B relationships, perspective taking exerts the strongest influence on trust, whereas emotional concern is the strongest driver for commitment. The results also confirm the moderating role of relationship age and that perspective taking leads to an increase in actual sales performance. This study underpins the relevance of empathy within services marketing, while providing a more detailed approach to account for empathy as a relation building tool. Practical and academic implications are also addressed.

Empathy for service: benefits, unintended consequences, and future research agenda

“…Moreover, cognitive empathy increases the quality of the relationship (assessed in terms of trust, commitment, reciprocity and exchange efficiency) between business solution customers and their project manager or consultant (Prior, 2016). Similarly, WeiBhaar and Huber (2016) show that client perceptions of consulting agents’ empathy contributed to their trustworthiness, (especially in younger relationships) and identified a positive direct link between agents’ empathy (perspective taking) and their objective sales performance.…”

Impact of relational benefits on trust in the Asian context: Alternative model testing with satisfaction as a mediator and relationship age as a moderator

“…Over time, customers become more knowledgeable and self‐confident about any service offering and about the service provider (Kalwani & Nayarandas, ; Raimondo, “Nino” Miceli, & Costabile, ), which changes the relative importance of different relational constructs and their influences on outcome variables (Weißhaar & Huber, ). Thus, customers gain confidence (Verhoef, Franses, & Hoekstra, ) based on the benefits received from services with a clear understanding of the offerings and it increases the chance of their satisfaction with the service provider over time.…”

Developing a deeper understanding of positive customer feedback

“…Wieseke et al (2012) found that "Feeling altruistic" or experiencing customer empathy, defined as customer's apprehension of and reaction to an employee's thoughts, feelings, and intentions during a service interaction, can act as a qualifier of social interactions, nurturing alignment of feelings and thoughts and creating smooth, harmonious interactions. In service research, empirical studies on empathy in employee-customer interactions are scarce (Weißhaar and Huber, 2016) with the majority of prior research studying the impact of employee empathy on customers (e.g. Zeithaml et al,1996).…”