Frontline Employees' Innovative Service Behavior as Key to Customer Loyalty: Insights into FLEs' Resource Gain Spiral

Abstract

Many service firms require frontline service employees (FLEs) to follow routines and standardized operating procedures during the service encounter, to deliver consistently high service standards. However, to create superior, pleasurable experiences for customers, featuring both helpful services and novel approaches to meeting their needs, firms in various sectors also have begun to encourage FLEs to engage in more innovative service behaviors. This study therefore investigates a new and complementary route to customer loyalty, beyond the conventional service-profit chain, that moves through FLEs' innovative service behavior. Drawing on conservation of resources (COR) theory, this study introduces a resource gain spiral at the service encounter, which runs from FLEs' emotional job engagement to innovative service behavior, and then leads to customer delight and finally customer loyalty. In accordance with COR theory, the proposed model also includes factors that might hinder (customer aggression, underemployment) or foster (colleague support, supervisor support) FLEs' resource gain spiral. A multilevel analysis of a large-scale, dyadic data set that contains responses from both FLEs and customers in multiple industries strongly supports the proposed resource gain spiral as a complementary route to customer loyalty. The positive emotional job engagement-innovative service behavior relationship is undermined by customer aggression and underemployment, as hypothesized. Surprisingly though, and contrary to the hypotheses, colleague and supervisor support do not seem to foster FLEs' resource gain spiral. Instead, colleague support weakens the engagement-innovative service behavior relationship, and supervisor support does not affect it. These results indicate that if FLEs can solicit resources from other sources, they may not need to invest as many of their individual resources. In particular, colleague support even appears to serve as a substitute for FLEs' individual resource investments in the resource gain spiral. Practitioner PointsBecause FLEs' innovative service behaviors during customer encounters can increase customer loyalty, firms should create environments that support high levels of emotional job engagement to foster innovative service behaviors. Managers should recognize that destructive customer actions are important contingencies with substantial effects, so they need to ensure that FLE training includes appropriate coping strategies and lessons for identifying different types of customers. Underemployment creates large problems for FLEs; to avoid these negative consequences, firms should offer FLEs more opportunities for personal development, more responsibilities, and more challenging tasks on individual levels.

Customer Loyalty During Pandemy: Understanding Loyalty Through The Lens of Online Ride Hailing Service Quality

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“…The journey map presented here demonstrates the need for further exploration by giving an account of the negative and positive touchpoints with the system. This work adds a perspective of crew experience and wellbeing, which is often neglected in work environments such as trains and aeroplanes (Boyd, 2002;Maria Stock et al, 2017).…”

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