INTRODUCTION:

Service sector dominates employment potential and national income figures of any country, but still there exists gap in managing relationships in service sector organizations particularly by frontline employees to delight their customers. There are varieties of traditional research studies with objective of understanding customers but they are way apart to actually find out the reasons why some organization blossom and other perish doing the same thing. The answer somewhere lies in how well you treat your customers through building and maintaining relationship.

The representatives or frontline employees which are contact point acts as an interface between organization and customers, basically in service sector organization, role of these employees in organizational function becomes more important. Business house usually hire consulting firms or apply some technical tools to know the needs and preferences of targeted customers. They ignore to take the advantages of the best consultants already employed i.e. their frontline employees. It is these employees who are closest to serving and supporting customer, they provide unfiltered information about how customers interact with a product or service.

FRONTLINE EMPLOYEES:

Frontline employees are “human face” of an organization as they provide touch points where customer comes in contact with service provider. Business leaders need to take care of their human capital as “people are greatest asset” for any organization, it is the management’s responsibility to care for their employee’s wellbeing both financially and emotionally. There exist vast literature on employee performance with their compensation but employees emotional well being while performing service are still unclear and hardly there is any research on this issue. However, the contribution made by these employees in improving customer loyalty and business performance is hard to define and even more complicated to measure. The theory is simple: happy employees help to create happy and loyal customers, which ultimately benefits company’s profit. Although there may not be a direct relationship between employee performance and customer loyalty but persistent low employee morale may affect service delivery and customer satisfaction in different ways: low productivity, absenteeism, supporting strikes, filing complaints, poor cooperation, resistance to change etc. Moreover, it is certainly tougher and probably impossible to maintain a loyal customer base without motivated and committed employees.

In service transaction, the way how customers are treated by employees is a key issue when it comes to considering revisit or recommending the company to others. These frontline employees are not simply required to communicate corporate values but have to provide a friendly face to the customers. In many cases, the employees with whom customers interact needs to be highly skilled, carrying out critical transactions on behalf of their employers. The performance of these employees is pivotal in ensuring a good overall customer experience. Frontline employees play a key role in developing strong customer relationships. The frontline employees have important information’s regarding delivery a range of other relational benefits to customers, to save the customer relationship when things go wrong. So, these employees need to be empowered and be allowed to play their part in building and maintaining strong relationships. But, the position of these employees in organizational structure basically in India is likely to be at lower end of the organizational hierarchy, whose views are often overlooked. But if critically observed, they act as first point of customer contact for example, waiters have clear idea for most frequently asked food items and most frequently unfinished food items in restaurant; likewise sales floor personnel and customer service representatives very well know where people first go to in the store and what frustrates the customer the most and receptionists knows who is happy coming and leaving (Tjan 2012).

According to Masdek, et. al. (2011), long-term customers are a vital source of profitability for a business firm as they purchase more as well as often pay more for products and services because of the trust and loyalty developed between customers and organization through shared time. Also, as business houses in service sector get to know them more, they serve them more efficiently and reasonably and at the customer end, they provide free advertising through word of mouth in return. Besides all those benefits, still most businesses lose 15-20% of their customers annually because of they are not managed well. Here the role of frontline employees become crucial and critical in service delivery and building relationships with customers as they often form their opinions of service quality of the firm based on how well the frontline employees perform. Mattila and Enz (2002) opined that frontline service employees need to remain courteous and professional to all customers as a part of their work. Frontline employees plays important role in revenue generating capacity and influence in image-building. Management should take great care while selecting these employees as they play a key role as: salesmen, problem solvers, reference point, coordinators and image builders etc. These frontline employees generate a good image for the organization in terms of performance, communication, personal conduct and efficiency on the whole as ambassadors of goodwill.

MANAGING CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP:

The concept of marketing is changing rapidly. Services being intangible in nature, it involves frequent encounter between employees and customers especially in this service sector. In such situation, the quality of service delivered becomes inseparable from the behavior of the service provider (frontline employee). During service encounter, when customer evaluates service delivered, the behavior of frontline employees plays an important role (Hartline and Ferrell, 1996). These employees can play the significant role in the delivery of service quality of any organization and making customer delighted. The degree to which customer will satisfy and delight himself or herself, ultimately it result in building customer loyalty, word of mouth, store loyalty, product loyalty, customer retention or even switching behavior. In certain cases what the customer feels about the behavior of contact employee’s results in forming positive perception towards the serving employee and organization. According to Bowen and Ford (2002), managing employees in service industry is different than managing employees in manufacturing industry in several dimensions like (i) the process of service delivery involves customer in service production process; (ii) service employee should respond to each situation uniquely; (iii) emotions plays important role in service settings; and (iv) along with job performance service employee need to manage the service delivery process. Perhaps, it is the human and emotional element in the service settings than the manufacturing settings which makes them different from each other. In service organizations, employees are in direct contact with customers particularly the frontline employees represents the organization in front of customers. If service sector employees are not emotionally well and are exhausted due to any personal or professional reasons, it will seriously reflect in their job performance, as it has direct influence in customer’s perception of organization (Schlesinger and Heskett, 1991). According to Beatty et al., (1996); Bitner et al. (2000) and Griffith, (2001) customer’s perception towards the service employees remains the perception towards the organization. In general sense, customer’s perception of an employee can be determinant of firm’s performance (Heskett et al., 1994; Heskett, Sasser and Schlesinger, 1997, 2003). So the firms should understand the new economics of services in which the frontline employee and customer plays center role (Heskett, Jones, Lovemen, Sasser and Schelsinger, 1994). Though, there exist dearth of studies to theorize the influence of frontline employees on the satisfaction and retention of customer and its overall influence in organizational performance. As the concept of marketing is changing from customer acquisition to retention, the marketer needs to make efforts to maintain and retain the existing customers. This can be achieved by building good relationship with customers in which role of frontline employees is critical one. The concept of relationship marketing emerged from the view that transactions in the service industry are relational in nature. For example, in banking industry, Walsh et al. (2004) visualized that relationship marketing as the activities carried out by banks in order to attract, interact with, and retain more profitable or high net-worth customers.

Customer relationship management evolved from the concept of customer orientation. It is not only important to serve the customers but also to maintain and retain relationship with customers. According to Kotler and Armstrong (2004), customer relationship management is the overall process of building, maintaining and enhancing profitable customer relationships by delivering superior customer value and satisfaction. Customer relationship has been identified as a tool to increase competitive advantage of organization over the competitors. According to Hawke and Hefferman (2006), relationship management is to obtain, retain and create repeat purchase and referrals. Relationship management mainly consist of establishing, nurturing, sustaining, and enhancing client relationship which will lead to maximizations of profit and market share of the organization (Hawke and Heffernan, 2006; Helm, Rolfes and Günter, 2006; Kandampully and Duddy, 1999).

In the present competitive environment, relationship marketing has become an important way of doing business, especially in service sector. Developing and maintaining positive relationship with customers is critical for success of service organization because it increases the potential to retain the customers. According to Lindgreen et.al., (2000), it is 10 times more expensive to attract new customer as compared to retain it and it cost 16 time more to bring new customer to the level of profitability as the lost one. Ndubisi, (2007) opined that organization should put effort to grow and enhance the quality of relationship with customers in order to gain mutual benefits to both the parties. According to Ndubisi (2003), through mutual symbiotic relationship, any organization can sustain and grow successfully. Therefore, the need of the hour is to give adequate importance to emotional intelligence at the time of entry point of service provider in this industry, their proper utilization and development, so that the organization can gain competitive advantage in the age of competition.

Frontline Employees and Managing Customer Relationship:

Managing customer relationship in competitive environment is not only opportunity but also the requirement of service based industries to survive. Traditionally criteria for selection of employees were based on cognitive skills but according to Goleman (1998), employees with high level of emotional self-awareness and empathy building long-term relationship with customers will lead to higher sale and customer satisfaction. According to Prasad (2012), the service performance of the employees and their capability to retain the customer is dependent on the dimensions emotional intelligence namely; social awareness, self-regulation and self-awareness. According to Zineldin (1995), it takes time, cost and effort to attract new customer or reconstruct a broken relationship than to retain and sustain the existing one. For business relationship, continuity of the selection of business relationship manager and frontline employees should be equally based on emotional competencies along with cognitive competencies (Heffernan et al., 2008; Goleman, 1998). Also the employees who are in direct interaction with customer in the service industry should be aware of the concept of emotional intelligence an employee having high level of emotional intelligence must be able to put effort to improve the element of emotional intelligence (Heffernan et al., 2008).

The inseparable nature of service makes production and consumption of service between employee and customer leading to inter dependence role between service provider and the customer (Solomon et.al., 1985) in which emotional intelligence of service provider plays crucial role. In service performance, customer needs to feel that they are being valued. This feeling allow them to overcome with the ambiguity involved while interacting with the organization. In certain situation when it becomes difficult for customer to evaluate service, then they look for other facet like interaction or interpersonal ways to assess the service quality (Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry, 1985). Thus, it can be concluded that providing personal relationship to the customer can be one of the reason for customers to return or retain with the organization. According to Reichheld (1996), a company’s profit is doubled if it does small improvement to retain customer because it is less expensive to serve long-term customer also the loyal customer have higher willingness to pay a price premium. The image of the service firm stands on the quality of service delivered unlike the manufacturing firm which is based on the quality of the product. Hence, it can be concluded that frontline employee’s acts as a key participant in any service delivery process and customers meet them while consumption of service. Thus, every individual employee need to be responsible for the image of service organization in customer’s perception and it becomes more challenging when an employee works at the lowest level of organization. Finally, from the above discussion, it can be concluded that the frontline employees play a very significant role in the success of service sector. So, along with the cognitive skills, these employees should be equally equipped with the emotional skills in order to attract, maintain and retain customers so that both should be benefitted symbiotically.

CONCLUSIONS:

The management of organizations has to move from traditional criteria for selection of employees on the basis of their cognitive skills to high level of self-awareness and empathy in order to build long-term relationship with existing and potential customers. These employees should be trained and retrained in tailored way with due emphasis to build their capability and competencies by using appropriate trainers and techniques. The higher the spirit and morale of these frontline employees the better will be their relationship with customers, the higher will be their ability to manage customer relationship which will ultimately build goodwill and profitability of the organization. The present study is an attempt to assess how much and how far role of frontline employees is related and influences managing customer relationship. Thus from the above backdrop of previous studies it can be concluded that the frontline employees of any organizations plays important role in attracting, managing and delighting customers. Their behavior influence customer satisfaction and have direct influence on company’s performance so organization must seriously take care of their best representatives.

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Received on 13.07.2017 Modified on 02.08.2017

Asian J. Management; 2017; 8(4):1347-1350.

DOI: 10.5958/2321-5763.2017.00205.0