Communicative skills that support value creation: A study of B2B interactions between customers and customer service representatives

Abstract

Although interaction has been acknowledged as central in value creation there is still a lack of empirical studies on how value creation is accomplished in practice, and in particular how communicative skills support customers' value creation. The purpose of this paper is therefore to generate a deeper understanding of how customer service representatives' communicative skills in conversations with customers support customers' value creation. We argue that value creating processes correspond to customers' roles as "feelers", "thinkers" and "doers". Accordingly, value creation involves three interdependent elements, an emotional, a cognitive and a behavioral. Based on a qualitative research design, drawing on an empirical study of 80 telephone conversations between customers and customer service representatives in a business-to-business context, the paper demonstrates three communicative skills that are essential in supporting customers' value creation: attentiveness, perceptiveness and responsiveness. The findings show how employees, by means of these communicative skills support customers' value creation. Attentiveness supports cognitive elements of the customers' value creating processes, whereas perceptiveness supports value creation in terms of cognitive, behavioral and emotional aspects. Finally, responsiveness supports the customer's cognitive as well as behavioral value creation.

Customer perceived value—Conceptualization and avenues for future research

“…However, as empirical investigations of value in a business-to-business context have also been increasing (see for a recent application, e.g. Salomonson, Åberg, & Allwood, 2012), extensively reviewing the conceptualization and model taxonomy of value applied in a business-to-business context, and by that distinguishing between different contexts, is a vital area for further research.…”

Building industrial brand equity by leveraging firm capabilities and co-creating value with customers

“…Thirdly, customers' perception of value depends heavily on the firms' marketing of the value offering. Especially in the B2B context, seller's good communication, such as visit of sales and technical people, can greatly help organizational buyers form better customer value expectations, which will in turn improve customer's willingness and confidence to cooperate and participate in value cocreation activities (Salomonson, Åberg, & Allwood, 2012).…”

Commentary on “Storytelling by the sales force and its effect on buyer–seller exchange” by David Gilliam and Karen Flaherty

“…It is a particularly popular subject in relation to leadership (e.g., Denning, 2006) and the marketing field, including business to consumer (B2C) marketing (Cowley, 2014), specifically in advertising (Mattila, 2000;Padgett & Allen, 1997;Polyorat, Alden, & Kim, 2007) and digital marketing (Pulizzi, 2012), where it has become synonymous with content marketing. However, as far as we know, limited research (Salomonson, Aberg, & Allwood, 2012) has been carried out on storytelling in business to business marketing to date, and the article by Gilliam and Flaherty (2015) is among the first attempts to empirically explore the use of storytelling in customer-supplier relationships by addressing three research questions: 1) When salespeople tell stories, what are their motives for doing so? 2) What is the nature of the stories told in a sales context?…”