1. Leveraging the People Factor

2. 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
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3. 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.
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4. Boundary Spanning: A Representation
Drama Aspects:
1. Operate the “frontstage”
2. Must attend to “personal front”
3. Success depends on “performance”
Boundary Spanner Functions:
1. Information processing
2. External representation
Bowen and Schneider (1985)
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5. 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.
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6. 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).
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7. 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.
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8. What Should Be Done to Ensure Employee Excellence?
Hire intelligently
Train intensively & continuously
Monitor incessantly
Reward inspirationally
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9. responding to employees' needs or wants, and
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.
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10. The management practice of sharing with frontline employees:
Empowerment
The management practice of sharing with frontline employees:
information,
rewards,
knowledge, and
Power
Allows them to better respond to customers’ needs and expectations. 
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11. 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.
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12. Greater monetary investment in selection and training.
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.
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13. 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. 
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14. Fig. 2.4
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15. Fig. 2.4
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