BATON ROUGE – Employee engagement is one of the major components that drive customer satisfaction and, ultimately, organizational success in the service industry.
One example of employee engagement is when service employees feel high energy levels, they are more willing to invest in their work tasks. They experience a sense of enthusiasm, dedication, and pleasure while executing work roles, which elevates their work performance. In turn, employee engagement influences customer engagement. When employees go above and beyond, customers are more likely to interact in a service relationship with a brand or organization and add value to that firm.
A new interdisciplinary study between marketing and management researchers uses meta-analysis to bridge employee and customer engagement through service employee work performance. The study, “Bridging Two Tales of Engagement: A Meta-Analytic Review of Employee Engagement in Service Contexts,” by LSU’s E. J. Ourso College of Business Department of Marketing Assistant Professor Kris Lindsey Hall, along with six co-authors, is published in the Journal of Service Management.
Hall explains in this video that the study aims to investigate the relationship between employee engagement and customer engagement within service contexts and to explore how a mediating mechanism, service employee work performance, links with both. In the study, the authors used a meta-analysis to conduct their interdisciplinary research to help determine the magnitude and direction of the relationship between employee engagement and customer engagement. Meta-analysis is an examination of data from a number of scientific studies of the same or similar subject to determine overall trends.
The results of the study suggest that service employee work performance, consisting of service employee task performance and contextual performance, serves as an important intervening mechanism between employee engagement and customer engagement. The findings recommend that to maximize service employee work performance, employees must go beyond simply being satisfied in their work roles. Instead, they must feel energized, find fulfillment and meaning and be engrossed in their work to maximize the service they provide to customers, which ultimately creates a stronger customer relationship.