Overview

Edited by:

Sharyn Rundle-Thiele
University of Southern Queensland

and

Rebekah Russell-Bennett
Queensland University of Technology

I think the future of research on employee-customer interfaces should include perspectives and scholars from service science, service management, service engineering, and (especially) service arts.

Epilogue - Raymond P Fisk

Service sector research has focused on employee-customer interfaces (or customer-employee interfaces) since the 1970s. Moving beyond the 4Ps of marketing, emerging perspectives in the 1980s (Booms & Bitner 1981; Grove & Fisk 1983) placed special emphasis on people and their interactions. A triangular model of services marketing from Grönroos (1990) was elaborated by Kotler (1994) and then Brown and Bitner (2006). This captured the modern intermingling of marketing and management functions. Today, interactions at the employee-customer interface are central to understanding service organizations, services marketing, service encounters, delivery and service customers.

Linkage research involves linking employee experiences at work with the experiences employees provide for customers - leading to outcomes for the employee, the organization and the customer. This special issue brings together management, marketing, organizational behavior and customer behavior researchers - addressing employees and customers, the behaviors individuals engage in within a service context, and their effects on employee, organizational and consumer outcomes.

Editorial - Sharyn Rundle-Thiele and Rebekah Russell-Bennett

People and their interaction is the essence of this special issue of the Journal of Management and Organization on employee-customer interfaces... From my perspective the eight articles in this special issue untangle employee-customer interfaces into two broad themes. Three of these articles are concerned with characteristics of people (employees and managers) and five articles are concerned with situational influences (external and internal influences).

'Untangling the Employee-Customer Interface for Services'
Epilogue - Raymond P Fisk
McCoy College of Business Administration, Texas State University-San Marcos

Table of Contents

Editorial
Sharyn Rundle-Thiele, Rebekah Russell-Bennett

Service Sells: Exploring connections between customer service strategy and the psychological contract
Leanne Cutcher

The Role of the Customer Advocate: Contextual and task performance as advocacy participation
Jane Galloway Seiling

Work Climate and Customer Satisfaction: The role of trust in the retail context
Long W Lam, Dora C Lau

Service Climate and Employee Wellbeing in Higher Education
Angela Martin

Service Staff Attitudes, Organisational Practices and Performance Drivers
Amanda Beaton, Ian Lings, Siegfried P Gudergan

Aggression at the Service Delivery Interface: Do you see what I see?
Loraleigh Keashly, Joel H Neuman

Optimising the Internal Value Chain: Principles and practices
Mark T Spence, Sudhir H Kale

Employee/Customer Interface in a Service Crisis: Impact of senior management attributes and practices on customer evaluation
Nell Kimberley, Charmine EJ Hartel

Epilogue: Untangling the Employee-Customer Interface for Services
Raymond P Fisk