Proactive Customer Research Articles

Personal Recognition and Proactive Customer Service Performance: A Dual-Path Model

In this study, we investigated the effect of personal recognition on the proactive customer service performance. We proposed a dual process model that identifies both motivational and affective med...

Early Proactive Education, Customer Retention, and Demand for Technology Support: Evidence from a Field Experiment

Do service provider efforts to educate customers influence customer outcomes? We analyze the outcome of a field experiment executed by a major public cloud infrastructure services provider in 2011. 366 out of 2,673 customers who adopted the service during the experiment received a service intervention: an engagement through which the provider offered initial guidance on how to use basic features of the service. Before execution, it was unclear if this proactive customer education would have positive or negative effects on customer retention and demand for technology support. We show the treatment reduces by half the number of customers who churn from the service during the first week. Further, treated customers ask 19.55% fewer questions during the first week of their tenure than the controls. Although the treatment’s effects decay within one week, we show that such proactive customer education can have significant economic benefits for the provider. In particular, we find that treated customers increase their accumulated usage of the service by 46.57% in the eight months after signup. Finally, we provide evidence that the effects of the treatment are strongest among customers who have less experience with the provider.

The Joint Effects of Perspective Taking and Proactive Personality on Customer Service Performance

The effect of perspective taking on performance is well documented in extant literature, yet a lack of theoretical discussion explicates how employees’ adoption of the customer’s perspective results in satisfactory customer service performance. The current study fills this void. Drawing from both motivated information processing and proactivity perspectives, we establish a theoretical model that delineates the process of how customer-oriented perspective taking contributes to proactive customer service performance. We conducted a three-wave time-lagged study, involving 145 frontline employees and their immediate supervisors in the Chinese hospitality industry, to test the research model. The results of multilevel structural equation modeling show that a high level of role-breadth self-efficacy (RBSE) (Time 2) results when employees take the customer’s perspective (Time 1). This relationship becomes stronger if employees are also high in proactive personality (Time 1). Furthermore, a high level of RBSE (Ti...

Managing Churn to Maximize Profits

Customer defection threatens many industries, prompting companies to deploy targeted, proactive customer retention programs and offers. A conventional approach has been to target customers either based on their predicted churn probability, or their responsiveness to a retention offer. However, both approaches ignore that some customers contribute more to the profitability of retention campaigns than others. This study addresses this problem by defining a profit-based loss function to predict, for each customer, the financial impact of a retention intervention. This profit-based loss function aligns the objective of the estimation algorithm with the managerial goal of maximizing the campaign profit. It ensures (1) that customers are ranked based on the incremental impact of the intervention on churn and post-campaign cash flows, after accounting for the cost of the intervention and (2) that the model minimizes the cost of prediction errors by penalizing customers based on their expected profit lift. Finally, it provides a method to optimize the size of the retention campaign. Two field experiments affirm that our approach leads to significantly more profitable campaigns than competing models.

Doing the right thing without being told: Joint effects of initiative climate and general self-efficacy on employee proactive customer service performance.

We developed and tested a cross-level model of the antecedents and outcomes of proactive customer service performance. Results from a field study of 900 frontline service employees and their supervisors in 74 establishments of a multinational hotel chain located in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia demonstrated measurement equivalence and suggested that, after controlling for service climate, initiative climate at the establishment level and general self-efficacy at the individual level predicted employee proactive customer service performance and interacted in a synergistic way. Results also showed that at the establishment level, controlling for service climate and collective general service performance, initiative climate was positively and indirectly associated with customer service satisfaction through the mediation of aggregated proactive customer service performance. We discuss important theoretical and practical implications of these findings.

Proactive Customer Relationship Management In E-Commerce

By addressing customers individually and taking over selected tasks, push concepts allow suppliers to play a more active role in e-commerce and to improve their customer relationship management (CRM). An overview on nature, concepts and technical implementations of push concepts is given. The main characteristics of CRM and opportunities offered by concepts of mass customization are described. Special attention is paid to push concepts on relationship level, as this is particularly relevant for CRM. Different approaches to predict future needs of the customer and to derive individual offers are introduced. In the proposed concept, actively addressing customers leads to differentiation strategies at moderate costs. The advantages of integrating push concepts into CRM are summarized and classified in a final conclusion.

Proactive customer orientation and its role for creating customer value in global markets

Today’s business customers expect sellers not only to respond effectively to their expressed needs but also to understand their business sufficiently well to proactively address their latent and future needs. Yet, research shows that many firms underestimate, misunderstand, or overlook these customer expectations. To draw clarity to this discrepancy, this study explores the notion of proactive customer orientation and examines the degree to which this capability offers an opportunity for competitive advantage. While research in recent years has explored the role of proactive customer orientation in new product performance, empirical investigation in this stream of market orientation literature is significantly underdeveloped. We assess the impact of the proactive customer orientation construct on value creation by taking a novel approach that examines the proactive customer orientation → value → satisfaction → loyalty chain using data from 800 business customers in India, Singapore, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We find that, relative to other firm capabilities, proactive customer orientation is the most consistent driver of customer value across our multinational data set. Results also show robust effects for the interaction of proactive and responsive customer orientation to create superior value. Several moderating conditions further frame the impact of this capability: intense levels of customer value change, a global relationship scope, and a transnational relationship structure. Overall, findings significantly advance the understanding of the proactive dimension within market orientation and provide marketers with insights for voice of the customer processes.

Proactive Customer Service Performance: Relationships With Individual, Task, and Leadership Variables

Despite the increasing interest in specific forms of proactive employee behavior in domains such as career development and organizational change, little research has investigated proactive behavior in the realm of customer service. Based on a review of the literatures on proactive behavior, customer service, and job performance, this study investigated relationships between a relevant set of individual and situational predictor variables and proactive customer service performance (i.e., individual service employees' self-started, long-term-oriented, and persistent service behavior that goes beyond explicitly prescribed requirements). Field survey data from 186 supervisor-subordinate dyads working in a large financial services organization demonstrated that proactive service performance, as rated by supervisors, was factorially distinct from prescribed task performance. Multiple regression analysis revealed that proactive service performance was significantly and positively associated with employee ratings of trait personal initiative, affective organizational commitment, task complexity, and participative leadership. The task and leadership variables explained incremental variance in proactive service performance beyond the individual predictors.

Preventative maintenance: A proactive customer service

Telecommunications service providers constantly struggle with the delicate balance of shrinking maintenance budgets and the erosion of their internal knowledge base. Focus on the growing data requirements and new technologies has increased the demand for preventative maintenance in networks for all technologies and domains. Service providers are asking technical experts to identify issues and recommend solutions to achieve optimal network performance and prevent service disruptions. Critical resources in their maintenance and operations groups are seeking support to identify potential network problems, prioritize efforts, and identify the related work activities. Lucent Technologies has responded to these needs by creating a portfolio of preventative maintenance services that identify, analyze, and recommend solutions to solve and prevent network issues. The preventative maintenance suite of services utilizes a combination of specialized skills and state-of-the-art platforms to address network issues such as performance degradation and capacity bottlenecks. The services portfolio includes diagnostic reports and online views of hardware configurations of critical network components for wireline and wireless networks.

E-health centre: a web-based tool to empower patients to become proactive customers.

E-health centre: a web-based tool to empower patients to become proactive customers.

Building a brand.comm

Brands live and die on their successful interaction with brand communities— including customers, employees, consultants, partners, and investors. Based on experience and analysis, Lynn Upshaw has distilled five best practices that nurture this exchange in digital environments. These emphasize brand‐name flexibility, integrated marketing, superiority rather than simply differentiation, maximum consumer involvement, and proactive customer service. It's solid advice for those struggling in an e‐world now filled with doubters and skeptics.

Insuring Quality: How to Improve Quality, Compliance, Customer Service, and Ethics in the Insurance Industry

The Relationship Between Quality and Image Quality and the Media Perceptions of Quality and Customer Service Image and Marketing Replacement of One Policy With Another Quality and Selling Can Mix Selling and Customer Service What Complaints to Insurance Regulators Tell Us About Customer Service Quality and the Regulators Customer Service When the Customer's a Crook Less Than Sympathetic Customers It's a Small World After All Rate Hikes and Customer Satisfaction Difficult Customers and Customer Service World Class Quality Mission Accomplished? Customer Disservice: A Tongue-in-Cheek Guide to Alienating Customers What Do Customers Want? Stupid Service Tricks Burn-Out Swearing Off Customer Service Consistency in Claim Handling Worker's Compensation Best Practices Best Practices for Agents Timeliness & Customer Service Accessibility & Customer Service Waiting for Service Customer Expectations Expectations of Bad Service Fair and Equal Treatment of All Customers Fair Warnings & Quality Consistent Coverage Decisions Customer Feedback and Complaint Handling Quality Initiatives Suggestion Boxes Management Support Limping the Talk Barriers to Quality Improvement This Company Isn't What It Used to Be (and It Wasn't That Great Before) Recognition of Employees Employee Satisfaction Downsizing and Employee Dissatisfaction Bad Employees Bad to the Bone Employees and Agents Proactive Customer Service Quality Meetings on Quality Quality Surveys Quality Relationships Keeping Internal Customers Satisfied Quality Versus the Competition Index