Abstract
The continuing investment in IT applications in business operations by enterprises worldwide has generated interest and research among the academia pertaining to whether and how IT applications can enhance employees work performance. Within such a context, it is the objective of this paper to hypothesize and illustrate how service employees can utilize the IT-based knowledge to improve their service performance and achieve customer satisfaction. A model is developed based upon the literature of categorization and adaptive behavior, conceptualizing a IT-knowledge driven process in which employees categorize customers and adapt to them by modifying service delivery and customizing service options. Five hypotheses are thus proposed within the theoretical framework of this model to justify the causal relationship in-between IT-knowledge and service performance, mediated by employees’ adaptive behavior. It is argued in this paper that IT-based knowledge enables employees to assign the prospective customers to customers categories so as to anticipate their expectations and preferences. Accordingly, employees adjust their interpersonal behavior in their interactions with customers and customize service options to customers’ preferences. With the introduction of IT-based knowledge as an antecedent to adaptive behavior, this paper enriches the extant literature in IT support for employees performance and offers new insight to business management when motivating their service employees to elevate the level of customer satisfaction with the service quality.
Highlights
There is a continuing investment globally in IT applications like Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Sales Force Automaton (SFA)
This paper looks closely at the process and the mechanisms frontline employees experience in their adaptive behavior by developing a conceptual model using “IT-based Knowledge”, “Adaptive Behavior” and “Service Performance” as key constructs
In service businesses, such as banking, medical and legislative companies, it is a common goal to maintain a high level of service quality, because service quality is antecedent to customer satisfaction and to customer purchase intention towards the service provider [26]
Summary
There is a continuing investment globally in IT applications like Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Sales Force Automaton (SFA). They conducted three case studies which provide evidence for the suggestion that CRM knowledge is supportive of such positive performance outcomes as optimized service quality, higher levels of customer satisfaction and marketing campaign success Following such rationalizations, this paper proposes that IT-based knowledge, i.e., customer information gathered and managed via IT applications has a positive impact on business performance. Such a conceptualization can enrich the extant literature in the domain of IT-support for employees performance, as IT-based knowledge is introduced as an antecedent to employees’ adaptive behavior at work Another motivation for the theorization comes from an inquiry about the service quality perceived by the customers when frontline employees utilize IT-based knowledge. The paper concludes with theoretical as well as managerial implications
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