What motivates professional service firm employees to nurture client dialogues?

Fischer, Alban; Sieg, Jan Henrik; Wallin, Martin W.; Krogh, Georg von

doi:10.1080/02642069.2014.871535

Cited by 11 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 70 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…In designing and marketing their value propositions, service firms need to give significant attention to the practices through which multiple actors interact and co-create value in specific contexts (Fischer, Sieg, Wallin, & von Krogh, 2014;Mikolon et al, 2015).…”

Section: Theoretical Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

What's in it for me? Capital, value and co-creation practices

Lombardo

Cabiddu

2017

Industrial Marketing Management

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Section: Theoretical Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

What's in it for me? Capital, value and co-creation practices

Lombardo

Cabiddu

2017

Industrial Marketing Management

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…Similarly, if a professional service is reliant on high levels of knowledge intensive judgement this will in turn contribute to both variation and relatively extended process throughput times (Sasser et al., 1978; Schmenner, 2004). Finally, the extent to which professionals in a given service setting adhere to explicit external codes of ethics and implicit norms that guide appropriate behaviour (Fischer et al., 2014), reduces the need for, and associated costs of, internal service quality monitoring (Goodale et al., 2008), but may also act to minimize the influence of operations managers (Harvey, 1990). Here, we examine characteristics in relation to customer engagement, customization, and knowledge/capital intensity.…”

Section: Literature Review and Research Questionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…front rather than back office operations), these typologies are also generally referring to the relative ‘activity’ of the interaction (Mersha, 1990; Goodale et al., 2008). In other words, a professional service is highly interactive because it is assumed that there is extensive dialogue between the client and the provider (Kellogg and Nie, 1995; Frey et al., 2013; Fischer et al., 2014), where both the service requirements and service package are discussed and designed. It is also asserted that these high engagement service operations allow the customer/client to actively intervene with their service processes (Verma, 2000), often to request modifications to what is being delivered.…”

Section: Literature Review and Research Questionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Examining the characteristics and managerial challenges of professional services: An empirical study of management consultancy in the travel, tourism, and hospitality sector

Brandon‐Jones

Lewis

Verma

et al. 2016

J of Ops Management

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper finds that OM's 'one-size-fits-all' characterization of professional services, namely high levels of customer engagement, extensive customization, knowledge intensity, and low levels of capital intensity, does not hold when carrying out a 'deep dive' (to the best of our knowledge, a first in this area of OM) into consultancy in the US travel, tourism, and hospitality sector. We analyse mixed-method data (semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and a besteworst choice experimental survey) and observe that consultancy can actually be quite remote and passive and that any periods of face-to-face 'engagement' will typically be time limited and focused on specific project phases. Moreover, and further confirming the value of a study that allowed us to investigate professional service operations in a specific market context, our data suggest this may often be at the behest of the client. The significant variation observed in levels of customization we interpret as confirming Maister's (1993) notion of a portfolio of brains, grey hair, and procedural work. We also observed relatively high levels of capital intensity; reflecting perhaps the vintage of most OM characterizations and the dramatic ICT-related changes that have occurred in all business operations in the last 20 years. The work also demonstrates the necessity of a more contingent perspective on PSOM. We assess the impact of both firm (scale, specialization) and individual level (leverage) characteristics to demonstrate significant variation within what might be expected to be a relatively homogenous group of professional service operations. For example, investigating the effects of specialization (via a typology of consulting operations: superspecialists, generalists, deep knowledge traders, deep market knowledge traders) revealed that relative degree of interaction may be dependent upon degree of expertise, such that it was the super-specialists in our sample that spent less time with clients and the more generalist firms who were complementing their limited expert status with high levels of interaction (networking, etc.).

show abstract

“…They do not, however, clearly define and conceptualize the relationship. Thus, while research has aimed to understand topics related to professional-client relationships, such as their value (Howden & Pressey, 2008) and how professional service firm employees sustain client dialogue (Fischer, Sieg, Wallin, & Krogh, 2014), limited research has been done on defining the client-professional relationship as such.…”

Section: Client-professional Relationshipsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Business-to-business professional service relationships under multiple logics

Skjølsvik

2016

The Service Industries Journal

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Trends towards service standardization and formalization appear to be contradicting rather than supporting service-dominant logic. Few studies have tried to understand how organizations deal with these contradictions. This paper explores the presence of contradicting logics in businessto-business professional service relationships. Based on 78 interviews with buyers and sellers, the study shows that the nature of the relationship is defined by the need to balance the contradicting logics at both the individual and firm level. While individual relationships have traditionally been intimate, more instant relationships and knowledge of context is replacing intimacy under increased formalization and goods-dominant logic to ensure co-production. At the firm level, parallel rather than single relationships are used under a more formalized and goods-dominant logic. These findings add to existing knowledge about the integration of service-and goods-dominant logics and suggest that a revised conceptualization of clientprofessional relationships is needed. 2 Keywords: Service logic, professional services, business relationships, parallel relationships, formalization. 2007) in line with the service-dominant logic. However, to the extent that the goods-dominant logic influences the relationship, it would be interesting to understand whether and how the relationship incorporates this logic. To do so, this paper addresses the following research question: What is the nature of the client-professional relationship under conditions of combined service-and goods-dominant logic? By addressing this question, this paper aims to contribute to two main theoretical areas: First, the research acknowledges the co-existence of service-and goods-dominant logics and shows empirically how these conflicting logics are combined in client-professional relationships.Second, the research adds to the development of a theory of professional service firms in general (Greenwood, Li, Prakash, & Deephouse, 2005;Løwendahl, 2005;Von Nordenflycht, 2010), as well as to research on client-professional relationships in particular.The paper is structured as follows: First, the core theoretical foundation of service-and goodsdominant logics is described. The concepts of a professional service firm, a professional service and the client-professional relationship are then addressed. Following this theoretical background, we describe the methodology used to study the research question and present the findings, showing how client-professional relationships are structured where goods-and service-dominant logics are present. The final sections of the paper contain a discussion and a conclusion describing implications for research and practitioners.

show abstract

What motivates professional service firm employees to nurture client dialogues?

Cited by 11 publications

References 70 publications

What's in it for me? Capital, value and co-creation practices

What's in it for me? Capital, value and co-creation practices

Examining the characteristics and managerial challenges of professional services: An empirical study of management consultancy in the travel, tourism, and hospitality sector

Business-to-business professional service relationships under multiple logics

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About