Friend or foe? Customer engagement’s value-based effects on fellow customers and the firm

Abstract

Customer engagement (CE) research has rapidly developed in recent years, with insight being gleaned in such areas as CE conceptualization, valence, measurement, and theoretical associations. However, despite the development of understanding of CE's impact on the focal customer (e.g. by cultivating his/her brand attachment/loyalty), much less remains known regarding CE's effects on other actors, particularly on multiple actors simultaneously. Based on the premise that differing actors tend to have different goals/interests, as advanced in stakeholder theory, we deduce that positive/negative CE can yield differing perceived valuebased effects across actors. To address this issue, we examine the particular case of positive/negative CE's value-creating/eroding effects as perceived by the actors of fellow customers and the firm, which we classify in a multi-actor typological framework. After introducing and discussing the typology, we conclude by outlining key implications that arise from this research, limitations, and avenues for further research on CE's multi-actor effects.

Rise of the Machines? Customer Engagement in Automated Service Interactions

“…Second, CE can take a positive or negative valence. While positive CE manifests as favorable brand-related cognitions, affect, and behaviors (e.g., by enjoying one’s brand interactions), negative CE seeks to impair specific actors (e.g., by disparaging a brand; Clark, Lages, and Hollebeek 2020). Third, while CE states can fluctuate (Brodie et al 2011), customers’ more stable engagement styles reflect their typical or characteristic engagement with a brand/firm (Prior and Marcos-Cuevas 2016), rendering the latter a more suitable customer segmentation variable.…”

“…We also anticipate CE through RPA-based interactions to decline over time, as customers typically switch off in these monotonous automated activities (Hollebeek, Clark, and Macky 2020). However, increasing CE, when observed, will tend to become progressively negatively valenced because customers’ growing investment (i.e., engagement) in their RPA-based service interactions predictably entails client-perceived issues that trigger negative CE (e.g., escalating complaint behavior due to slow RPA response times; Clark, Lages, and Hollebeek 2020), as shown in Figure 1 (Proposition 1). This negative spiral is particularly prevalent when customers perceive a lack of alternatives to RPA-based interactions (e.g., inability to solve one’s query with frontline staff).…”

Customer brand engagement during service lockdown

“…P1 stipulated that locked-down, promotion-focused customers engage in more platform-mediated interactions with essential service brands than usual. Given these customers' active, resourceful stance (Solem and Pedersen, 2016;Liberman et al, 2001), their platform-mediated interactions are likely to extend beyond those with the brand/firm alone, to ones with other actors (e.g., by exchanging brand-related ideas (e.g., recipes) with fellow customers; Clark et al, 2020;Alexander et al, 2018;Rosenbaum and Massiah, 2007). To fulfil these customers' desire to optimally experience their service brands during lockdown, P3: Promotion-focused customers' brand engagement in platform-mediated, essential service interactions sees a broader range of new or alternate brand-related uses and applications (vs. under regular market conditions).…”

“…Customer brand engagement (CBE), which exposes a client's "investment of operant resources (i.e., cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and/or social knowledge/skills) and operand resources (e.g., equipment) in [their] brand interactions" (Kumar et al, 2019, p. 141), has received widespread attention (Furrer et al, 2020). Given its interactive core, CBE has prime applicability in the service context that is characterized by high interactivity, including among customers, service staff, and fellow customers (Oertzen et al, 2020;Clark et al, 2020).…”

Fifteen years of customer engagement research: a bibliometric and network analysis

“…Despite this duality of perspectives, most published studies center on the former (i.e., customer's) viewpoint (e.g., Beckers et al, 2018;Kumar et al, 2019) and its effect on the focal customer him/herself (e.g., CE's impact on the individual's brand loyalty/attachment; Loureiro et al, 2017;So et al, 2016;Leckie et al, 2016). However, more recently, authors including Fujita et al (2020), Clark et al (2020), and Azer and Alexander (2020b) distil CE's effect on other actors (e.g., fellow customers).…”