Faculty Scholarly Dissemination Grants
Customer Engagement: A Multifaceted Experience in Multiple Relationship Contexts
Department
Marketing
College
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Date Range
2011-2012
Abstract
As firms increase their efforts to engage customers, researchers have responded by incorporating customer engagement (CE) in their work (Brodie et al. 2011, Vivek, Beatty and Morgan 2012). Following the conceptualizations of engagement in existing literature, this research focused on developing a multi-faceted scale of customer engagement. The applicability of the scale is then studied across contexts. CE scale is applicable to various contexts where there occurs, or is likely to occur, a service relationship between a focal object or agent and the subject. Such relationships have been the focus during initial development of the scale. However, our exploratory work also indicated that CE might be applicable to not only the typical business-customer relationships, but also to various other types of service relationships. These include (i) compliance based relationships such as employer-employee, government-citizens and; (ii) expertise based relationships such as attorney-petitioner and teacher-student relationships. Compliance based and expertise based relationships are also service relationships. In a compliance based relationship, the customer might not be willing to comply to the requirement, for instance law enforcement by police. In an expertise based relationship, the provider is an expert and knows what is good for the customer. However, in the present environment, the customer might not be totally willing to follow the provider's advice, such as not following prescription advice. Using interpretive research methods,we explore the applicability of the CE scale to such compliance and expertise based relationships and see how engaging customers in such situations can improve the outcomes.
Conference Name
SIBR 2012 Conference on Interdisciplinary Business and Economics Research
Conference Location
Bangkok, Thailand
ScholarWorks Citation
Dalela, Vivek and Vivek, Shiri D., "Customer Engagement: A Multifaceted Experience in Multiple Relationship Contexts" (2011). Faculty Scholarly Dissemination Grants. 448.
https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/fsdg/448
