Author: Agustin Asan
Follow me: @AgusAsan
University of Malaga
Grado en Marketing e Investigacion de Mercados
Professor: Jose Luis
Ruiz de Alba
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Agustín Asan exposing in the class of
Services Marketing , an article on COSE |
Service success through customer-oriented
employees?
The employees’ level of customer orientation is
considered an important leverage for service firms’ economic success.
Review of literature on customer
orientation of service employees
It is well established among marketing theorists that
firms which focus their activities on
the needs of their customers, i.e.
behave in a customer-oriented way, perform better than those companies that do
not.
In the context of service
quality research, it has been demonstrated that the behavior of service
employees affects the customer’s perception of the service.
(Kelley, 1992).
He proposes and empirically tests a conceptual framework of COSE determinants, including organizational constructs such as
organizational climate and socialization, as well as personal constructs such as motivational effort and direction.
(Brown, 2002) COSE is composed of: a needs dimension, which covers the
employee’s belief that he or she can fulfill
customer’s wishes; and an enjoyment
dimension, which represents the extent to which the employee enjoys
interactions with customers.
(Donavan,2004) COSE consists of five dimensions, entitled
“need to pamper”, “need to read the
customer”, “need for personal relationship”, “need to deliver”, and “need to
communicate”
(Hennig-Thurau and
Thurau, 2003) define COSE as
the employee’s behavior in person-to-person interactions and suggest a
three-dimensional conceptualization of COSE. They introduce three COSE dimensions, entitled:
-
an employee’s customer oriented skills
-
his or her motivation to serve customers
-
his or her self-perceived decision-making
authority
An employee can only behave in a fully
customer-oriented sense if all
dimensions exist.
It is important to note that the conceptualization of
COSE implies that all four dimensions (employee´s
technical skills, social skills, motivation, and decision-making power) are
indispensable to a certain extent to
enable employees to behave in a customer-oriented way.
The employee’s
technical skills refer to the knowledge
and those technical or motor skills which a service employee must possess.
The concept of social skills focuses on the service employee’s ability to take the customer’s
perspective during interactions.
Specifically, such
perspective taking can take place visually (i.e. the employee
understands what the consumer sees and perceives), cognitively
(i.e. the employee understands what the consumer
thinks), and emotionally (i.e. the employee understands what the consumer feels).
Regarding the motivation dimension of COSE, the
employee’s motivation to servecustomers consists of three elements, namely: a
positive valence of customer-oriented
behavior and the consequences associated with such behavior on the part of
the employee; the employee’s self-perception of being able to
behave in a customer-oriented way; and
his or her expectations of reaching the
desired outcome through engaging in such behavior.
Motivation is essential for the employee’s transformation of social and technical skillsninto
customer-oriented behavior.
Finally, the
employee’s self-perceived
decision-making authority corresponds to the extent to which service
employees feel authorized to decide on issues that concern customer’s interests
and needs. Self-perceived decision-making authority is related to the empowerment, concept intensively
discussed in the services literature which, however, refers to the “objective”
authority an employee has been given by the organization, whilendecision-making
authority is seen as a subjective
concept. As with motivation, decision-making authority is needed in order
to transfer an employee’s skills and intention to treat customers in a friendly
and competent way into actual behavior.
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