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Epilogue
Untangling the Employee-Customer Interface for Services
Raymond P Fisk
Professor; Chair, Department of Marketing, McCoy College of Business Administration, Texas State, University-San Marcos, San Marcos TX, USA
Keywords
employee, customer, interface, marketing, service
Article Text
The English word ‘service' originates in the Latin word ‘servus', which means slave. Many of the modern difficulties between employees and customers are embedded in that distant and unfortunate past. Academic service researchers have been concerned with employee-customer interfaces (or customer-employee interfaces as it is frequently phrased in marketing) from the earliest days of service research in the 1970s and 1980s. In the service marketing literature, virtually all of the early researchers saw a disconnection between the traditional managerial tools known as the marketing mix (the four Ps) and managing services. Booms and Bitner (1981) proposed three new marketing mix tools for services: participants, physical evidence and process. Similar points were made when Steve Grove and I (Grove & Fisk 1983) proposed a theatrical perspective for managing services, which described service organisations and service customers in terms on actors, audience, setting and performance. Both of these perspectives placed special emphasis on people and their interaction, which was rather new for the larger field of marketing. People and their interaction is the essence of this special issue of the Journal of Management and Organization on employee-customer interfaces.
Today, employee-customer interfaces are central to understanding service organisations and service customers. For example, major service marketing textbooks devote considerable attention to employee-customer interfaces (Fisk, Grove & John 2008; Lovelock & Wirtz, Zeithaml & Bitner 2006). One of the most influential concepts in services is a triangular classification model of services marketing that was first developed by Grönroos (1990) and was later elaborated by Kotler (1994) and Brown and Bitner (2006). In many ways, this model captures the modern intermingling of marketing and management functions.
The services marketing triangle model (See Figure 1) is based on three key components: organisations, employees, and customers. Between these three components are three forms of services marketing: internal marketing, external marketing and interactive marketing. Internal marketing is the marketing effort by an organisation directed at those who provide services. External marketing is the marketing effort by the organisation directed at customers. Interactive marketing is the marketing effort by the service employees directed at the organisation's customers. This model includes all the interactions between any service employee and any customer.
Brown and Bitner (2006) added the role of promises to the triangle model of services marketing. Internal marketing enables promises, external marketing makes promises and interactive marketing keeps promises. In short, interactive marketing is where the organisation proves its commitment to serving customers. The importance of interactive marketing was a major reason we (Fisk, Grove & John 2008) chose to title our book Interactive Services Marketing.
‘Untangling' is the first word in the title of this epilogue because I think it captures the great research challenge in studying human interactions. Human interaction is fundamentally entangled. Indeed, it might even be said that without entanglements what would be the point of interaction. The entanglement is physical (situations and environment) and psychological (both emotional and cognitive). Further, as humans we cannot pretend to be completely dispassionate in our research. We are entangled, too. What can we do to untangle this proverbial Gordian knot? We can label the parts of the knot and then tug on the parts until we pull them briefly apart.
Commentary on key themes
From my perspective the eight articles in this special issue untangle employee-customer interfaces into two broad themes. Three of these articles are concerned with characteristics of people (employees and managers) and five articles are concerned with situational influences (external and internal influences).
Characteristics of people
Leanne Cutcher examines the employee characteristic of service orientation. She found that service oriented employees resist organisational changes that are less customer-oriented. Jane Seiling proposed a conceptual framework for understanding organisational and customer advocacy behaviors by service employees. Her model helps explain key aspects of both internal and external marketing. Nell Kimberley and Charmine Härtel studied the role of senior managers during a service crisis and proposed a model of the employee-customer interface during crisis. Their logic that senior managers should model appropriate front-line behaviors during a crisis is quite compelling.
Situational influences
These situational influence articles concern work climate, service climate, organisational practices and internal influences, too. Rico Lam and Dora Lau propose a conceptual model of a trusting climate and retail customer satisfaction. A work climate based on trust encourages employees to engage in discretionary behaviors that are beneficial to customers. Angela Martin examines the influence of service climate (a similar concept to work climate) by empirically investigating the relationship between service climate and the psychological well being of university staff. Like work climate, positive service climates are good for the employee-customer interface. Amanda Beatson, Ian Lings and Siggi Guddergan examine the influence of service -oriented organisational practices on employee attitudes. Like work climate and service climate, positive organisational service orientation is good for employees. Mark Spence and Sudhir Kale examined how the internal environment influences customer outcomes and experiences. They proposed an interesting framework for service value chain optimisation that is built on service blueprinting and internal marketing. Loraleigh Keashly and Joel Neuman studied aggression at the service delivery interface. While some aspects of such aggression can be termed characteristics of employees or customers rather than situational influences, my own prior research on customer rage (Grove, Fisk & John 2004) found that a very large portion of customer rage incidents were situational. Preventing such aggression is essential to providing satisfactory employee-customer interfaces.
Future research on the employee-customer interface
In 2000, Steve Grove, Joby John and I (Fisk, Grove & John 2000) published a collection of perspectives from ten services experts: Leonard L Berry, Mary Jo Bitner, David Bowen, Stephen W Brown, Christian Grönroos, Evert Gummesson, Christopher Lovelock, Parsu Parasuraman, Benjamin Schneider, and Valarie Zeithaml. Each of them commented on the future of services marketing, and we synthesised their perspectives in a subsequent article (Grove, Fisk, & John 2003). One of the themes that emerged from the comments of the ten experts was a need for more research on the customer-employee interface.
From my perspective, the topic of employee-customer interfaces will continue to be an important topic that deserves further research. After all, human beings are social creatures and interaction is the essence of social behavior. In the bustling economies of our modern world, the social interaction between employees and customers is emblematic of the service economies. Here are my thoughts on where I think future research on the employee-customer interface is needed: service arts and service technology.
Service arts
Recently, IBM created a major initiative called Service Science, Management and Engineering (SSME) (http://www.ibm.com/university/ssme). In 2006 (Grove, John & Fisk 2006) and 2007 (Fisk, Grove, Daly & Ganz 2007) my coauthors and I have argued that one more part of the service field is needed: service arts. We think there are four significant benefits to developing and including service arts in the service domain. First, the arts are concerned with aesthetics and beauty, which is essential to service design. Second, the arts focus heavily on creativity, one of the most precious of human capacities. Third, the arts are learned skills that draw on centuries of rich history for inspiration and guidance. Fourth, the arts are most capable of stirring human emotions and delivering joy to the human experience. Without emotional content, a service would have no ability to connect with its employees or customers. In short, I think the future of research on employee-customer interfaces should include perspectives and scholars from service science, service management, service engineering, and (especially) service arts.
Service technology
Technology is rapidly changing service delivery. More and more employee-customer interactions are mediated by service technology. My colleagues Lia Patrício, João Falcão e Cunha and I (Patrício, Fisk & Cunha 2008), have developed a service blueprinting tool that can enable service organisations to create service delivery systems that allow customers to choose different levels of interaction with employees (face to face, via telephone or via the Internet). With the rapid pace of technological change, more research is needed on the use of new service technologies in future employee-customer interfaces. For example, how does the service experience change when both the employee and the customer interact in virtual worlds like Second Life (http://secondlife.com/) via avatars? The use of such service surrogates may become commonplace. Is there a future for employee avatar-customer avatar interface research?
Conclusions
In this epilogue, I have sought to comment on both the ancient and the modern nature of the employee-customer interface. Topics that are so deeply embedded in the complex fabric of human relationships can never really go out of style and they never cease to fascinate. In our private life, social relationships with our friends and family are essential to personal happiness. In our public life, social relationships between employees and customers are essential to enjoying working and to enjoying being a customer.
References
Booms BH and Bitner MJ (1981) Marketing strategies and organizational structures for service firms, in JH Donnelly and WR George (eds) Marketing of Services. Chicago: American Marketing Association, pp.47–51.
Brown SW and Bitner MJ (2006) Mandating a services revolution for marketing, in RF Lusch and SL Vargo (eds) The Service-Dominant Logic of Marketing: Dialog, debate and directions. Armonk, NY: ME Sharpe Inc.
Fisk RP, Grove SJ, Daly A and Ganz W (2007) Service Arts: Broadening the Services Field, Presentation at the AMA Frontiers in Service Conference, San Francisco, California.
Fisk RP, Grove SJ and John J (2000) Services Marketing Self-Portraits: Introspections, reflections and glimpses from the experts. Chicago: American Marketing Association.
Fisk RP, Grove SJ and John J (2008) Interactive Services Marketing 3rd edn, Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Grove SJ and Fisk RP (1983) The dramaturgy of service exchange: An analytical framework for services marketing, in LL Berry, LG Shostack and GD Upah (eds) Emerging Perspectives on Services Marketing, Chicago: American Marketing Association, pp.45–49.
Grove SJ, Fisk RP and John J (2003) The future of services marketing: Forecasts from ten services experts, Journal of Services Marketing 17: 107–121.
Grove SJ, Fisk RP and John J (2004) Surviving in the age of rage, Marketing Management March/April: 41–46.
Grove SJ, John J and Fisk RP (2006) Back to the future: Putting the people back in marketing, in Sheth JN and Sheth RS (eds) Does Marketing Need Reform? Armonk, NY: ME Sharpe.
Lovelock C and Wirtz J (2006) Services Marketing 6th edn, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
Lia P, Fisk FP and Falcão e Cunha J (2008) Designing multi-interface service experiences: The service experience blueprint, Journal of Service Research May (In print).
Zeithaml VA and Bitner MJ (2006) Services Marketing: Integrating customer focus across the firm 4th edn, New York: McGraw-Hill.
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