Engaging customer care employees in internal collaborative crowdsourcing: Managing the inherent tensions and associated challenges

Abstract

Customer care employees (CCEs) are an excellent source of ideas for new and enhanced services for customers. By serving many customers, CCEs have the ability to see patterns in unserved and underserved needs. By being inside rather than external to the firm, CCEs have the ability to offer suggestions that build on existing capabilities, which result in ideas that are more easily implementable. There is a long history of research and practice for soliciting suggestions from employees, but little of this work has described how CCEs can be organized into a temporary online crowd to cocreate innovative ideas. With the advent of crowdsourcing software platforms, online collaboration among geographically distributed CCEs is increasingly possible. We describe an action research study of Optum, a healthcare company that implemented a collaborative internal crowdsourcing initiative over a period of 18 months. The action research study led to the identification of three tensions and associated challenges. We outline eight HRM actions that were undertaken to mitigate the challenges of engaging CCEs in internal crowdsourcing efforts. Based on our findings, we lay out a general framework, implications, and future research directions for research and managerial actions when engaging CCEs in internal collaborative crowdsourcing.

Building innovation capabilities through human resources practices

“…While management literature coined the term micro-entrepreneurs, this term might mislead managers' hope for innovation: Bottom-up innovation does not inevitably work out. In fact, we hardly observed bottom-up innovation that led to radical product innovations, although some HR departments at the observed organizations support initiatives such as crowdsourcing (Malhotra et al, 2020). While the reader might wonder whether bottom-up efforts with high levels of employee engagement or top-down efforts with top strategy alignment may lead to higher innovation output, it seems worthwhile to take a look at some high-performing organizations to see how they decide.…”

Using Stretch Goals for Idea Generation Among Employees: One Size Does Not Fit All!

“…Recent research has focused on the selection process used to evaluate employeesuggested ideas (Reitzig and Sorenson 2013, Criscuolo et al 2017, Keum and See 2017, recognizing the importance of biases in selection processes. We extend this literature by focusing on the potential role of goal setting in internal crowdsourcing (Malhotra et al 2020) and showing how goals may further enhance the ability and intrinsic motivation of employees to generate novel and useful ideas. Although customer and process knowledge is a potentially valuable ingredient in the innovation process, encouraging a wider pool of employees whose core job is different from translating that knowledge into valuable product ideas is a difficult challenge for organizations to face.…”

“…To have a consistent flow of novel and useful ideas, organizations frequently leverage the expertise and insights of employees (Luttgens et al 2014). In particular, scholars have recognized customer-facing employees as an important source of innovation, as integrating information from customers with other sources within the firm can lead to highly original ideas (Baer and Frese 2003, Cooper et al 2004, Malhotra et al 2020. As examples, Singapore Airlines encourages idea generation from employees across departments such as ground and inflight services (Heracleous et al 2004), and Starbucks' first ice cream coffee drink (Frappuccino) originated as an idea from one of their employees (Aufreiter et al 2000).…”

“…However, actively accessing and digesting potentially useful knowledge take time and mental resources away from fulfilling primary responsibilities. Employees therefore experience inherent constraints when asked to generate ideas for novel business opportunities because innovation is often neither part of their skillsets nor of their main roles (Jasmand et al 2012, Rapp et al 2017, Malhotra et al 2020.…”

The open innovation journey along heterogeneous modes of knowledge-intensive marketing collaborations: a cross-sectional study of innovative firms in Europe

“…The OI marketing journey allows firms to better identify customers' needs and to generate ideas for innovation useful to attract the interest and to develop new relationships and opportunities (Boles and Link, 2017; Grimpe et al , 2017; Homburg et al , 2017). By integrating the voices of different kinds of stakeholders within the OI marketing journey, enterprises can effectively avoid new product failures and organizational tensions, as well as fostering innovation success (Mahlotra et al , 2020). Marketing knowledge is nowadays distributed and exchanged in collaborations with stakeholders and in networking and OI processes that, in turn, allow enterprises to learn about events and trends within the market, to identify opportunities, to build and maintain high-quality cooperative relationships with their stakeholders and to innovate (Zhang and Zhu, 2020).…”