Credit:
thinkstockphotos.com/Rice University
(October 14, 2015) Empowering
customers to give feedback to service providers can have a key motivational
impact on employees’ creativity and customer satisfaction, two important
service outcomes, according to a new study by management experts at Rice
University, the University of Connecticut, the University of Maryland, the
University of Minnesota and National Taiwan University.
“The findings suggest that service creativity is a powerful
avenue through which customer satisfaction can be achieved,” said study
co-author Jing Zhou, the Houston Endowment Professor of Management at Rice’s
Jones Graduate School of Business. “Service creativity allows employees to delight
customers in unusual ways or solve problems that existing protocol falls short
of addressing.”
The research, which will be published in the Journal of
Applied Psychology, was based on a multilevel analysis of multisource survey
data from 380 hairstylists matched with 3,550 customers in 118 hair salons
belonging to a large salon chain in Taiwan. Although the study was conducted in
the beauty service industry, the theoretical framework the authors developed
addresses fundamental psychological processes that are universal for individual
employees, authors said.
The study’s findings demonstrate that customers might
present a unique opportunity for service organizations to manage encounters
between customers and employees, Zhou said. “Our results suggest that
organizations can benefit from strategically marketing to customers in order to
cue them toward empowering their service provider. For example, managers should
look for chances to foster customers’ willingness to empower employees by
helping customers establish confidence in the employees and focusing on the
prospect of superior performance.”