Getting Smart: Learning From Technology-Empowered Frontline Interactions

Smart technologies are rapidly transforming frontline employee-customer interactions. However, little academic research has tackled urgent, relevant questions regarding such technology-empowered frontline interactions. The current study conceptualizes (1) smart technology use in frontline employee-customer interactions, (2) smart technology–mediated learning mechanisms that elevate service effectiveness and efficiency performance to empower frontline interactions, and (3) stakeholder interaction goals as antecedents of smart technology–mediated learning. We propose that emerging smart technologies, which can substitute for or complement frontline employees’ (FLEs) efforts to deliver customized service over time, may help resolve the long-standing tension between service efficiency and effectiveness because they can learn or enable learning from and across customers, FLEs, and interactions. Drawing from pragmatic and deliberate learning theories, the authors conceptualize stakeholder learning mechanisms that mediate the effects of frontline interaction goals on FLEs’ and customers’ effectiveness and efficiency outcomes. This study concludes with implications for research and practice

A comparison of attitude, personality, and knowledge predictors of service-oriented organizational citizenship behaviors

Attitude, personality, and customer knowledge antecedents were compared in their predictive ability of 3 service-oriented forms of employee organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs): loyalty, service delivery, and participation. For the 1st study, 236 customer-contact employees provided data concerning their OCBs and the attitude, personality, and knowledge antecedents. The 2nd investigation relied on data provided by 144 contact employees from a network of university libraries. Using hierarchical regression in both studies, the authors found that each of the 3 types of service-oriented OCBs was best predicted by different subsets of the antecedents. Job attitudes accounted for the most unique variance in loyalty OCBs, personality accounted for the most unique variance in service delivery OCBs, and customer knowledge and personality jointly were the best predictors of participation OCBs