Leveraging the People Factor Copyright Houghton Mifflin Company

Leveraging the People Factor Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

Service Employees and Their Behavior • Why Are Employees So Important? • Are All Service Employees Equally Important? • Which Are More Important: Technical Skills or Social Skills? • Ensuring Employee Excellence Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. 2

Boundary Spanners • Boundary spanners (contact personnel) • Frontstage employees who link an organization with its customers. • Represent the service in the customers’ eyes. • Technical skills • Proficiency with which service employees perform their tasks. • Social skills • Manner in which service employees interact with customers and fellow workers. Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. 3

Boundary Spanning: A Representation Boundary Spanner Functions: 1. Information processing 2. External representation Bowen and Schneider (1985) Drama Aspects: 1. Operate the “frontstage” 2. Must attend to “personal front” 3. Success depends on “performance” Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. 4

Functions of Service Personnel/Actors • Add tangibility to the service. • Act as source of information in the commonly ambiguous service situation and help the customer to cognitively frame the service encounter. • Often perceived as the service itself. • Customer satisfaction is influenced by the quality of the interpersonal interaction between the customer and the contact employee. Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. 5

How to Ensure Satisfying Service Encounters Through Employees • Must possess both "technical" and "social" skills (Davidow and Uttal 1989; Grönroos 1985, 1990). • Willing and capable of performing the tasks required of them. (Berry and Parasuraman 1991; Schneider and Bowen 1995). • Amount of effort the customer perceives the service employee expending (Mohr and Bitner 1994). • Getting them to engage in extra-role performance (Bettencourt and Brown 1993; Organ 1990). Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. 6

How to Ensure Satisfying Service Encounters Through Employees (cont’d) • Requires a worker who is empathetic, flexible, and inventive (Henkoff 1994). • Employees must appear to enjoy their jobs and the customers (Price, Arnould and Tierney 1995), i. e. impression management. Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. 7

What Should Be Done to Ensure Employee Excellence? • Hire intelligently • Train intensively & continuously • Monitor incessantly • Reward inspirationally Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. 8

Internal Marketing • Policy of treating employees as internal customers of the organization, • responding to employees' needs or wants, and • promoting the organization and its policies to the employee. Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. 9

Empowerment • The management practice of sharing with frontline employees: • information, • rewards, • knowledge, and • Power • Allows them to better respond to customers’ needs and expectations. Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. 10

Benefits of Empowerment • Quicker responses to customer needs during service delivery. • Quicker responses to dissatisfied customers during service recovery. • Greater employee satisfaction with jobs and themselves. • Employees will act more warmly and enthusiastically with customers. • Empowered employees are a great source of ideas. • Great word-of-mouth communication and retention. Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. 11

Costs of Empowerment • Greater monetary investment in selection and training. • Higher labor costs. • Slower or less consistent service delivery. • Possible violations of fair play. • Giveaways and bad decisions. Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. 12

Definition of Discretionary Effort • The difference between • the maximum effort one can bring to a task and • the minimum effort needed simply to get by. Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. 13

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. 14

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. 15