Developing Customer Service Innovations for Service Employees: The Effects of NSD Characteristics on Internal Innovation Magnitude

Journal of Service Research, 14(2) 164-179, 2011

17 Pages Posted: 26 Jan 2016

See all articles by Nita Umashankar

Nita Umashankar

Georgia State University

Raji Srinivasan

University of Texas at Austin - Red McCombs School of Business

Dustin Hindman

Dell Inc.

Date Written: January 24, 2016

Abstract

During product recovery, firms rely on their customer service agents to recover customers’ product failures and deliver superior customer service. However, customers who contact the firm about a product failure often are dissatisfied, which makes customer service agents’ jobs challenging. Therefore, firms continuously try to improve their internal customer service operations to increase benefits for customer service agents and, by extension, their customers. The authors hypothesize that the way firms design (agent codesign and design acceleration) and implement (agent enablement) an internal customer service innovation has direct and joint effects on the magnitude of benefits of the innovation to customer service agents, termed internal innovation magnitude. The authors test the conceptual model using data on 38 internal customer service innovations at a Fortune 500 high-technology firm. The findings extend the internal marketing literature by demonstrating that service employees represent a critical source of user-generated feedback. The findings also contribute to marketing practice by suggesting that accelerating the design process not only saves costs but also increases benefits for the internal users of the innovation.

Keywords: customer service, product recovery, service innovation, internal marketing, service employees

Suggested Citation

Umashankar, Nita and Srinivasan, Raji and Hindman, Dustin, Developing Customer Service Innovations for Service Employees: The Effects of NSD Characteristics on Internal Innovation Magnitude (January 24, 2016). Journal of Service Research, 14(2) 164-179, 2011, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2721516 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2721516

Nita Umashankar (Contact Author)

Georgia State University ( email )

P.O. Box 4050
Atlanta, GA 30303-3083
United States

Raji Srinivasan

University of Texas at Austin - Red McCombs School of Business ( email )

Austin, TX 78712
United States

Dustin Hindman

Dell Inc. ( email )

1 Dell Way
Round Rock, TX 78682
United States

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