Understanding customer engagement: What makes customers more likely to provide feedback to an organization in the services sector

Abstract

Given that companies such as Proctor & Gamble are saying that they expect to get more than half of their ideas from outside the organization, there is a surprising lack of published research on how to encourage more of those ideas to reach organizations. Within the service climate, a focus on customer orientation and customer engagement has been linked to helping organizations remain competitive. Encompassing all of the non-transactional customer behaviours that can affect an organization, discussions of customer engagement often include things such as word of mouth, advocacy, and co-creation, yet they often do not mention customer feedback. Word of mouth can only extend an organization’s promotional budget, whereas customer feedback, another piece of the customer engagement puzzle, has the power to impact innovation and improvements within an organization. As such, this study contributes to the understanding of the antecedents of customer feedback. A model is put forth combining the technology acceptance model, knowledge management, customer complaint behaviour, and the theory of planned behaviour, showing that the intention to provide feedback is affected by customer characteristics (attitude towards feedback, subjective norms), perceptions of the feedback process (perceived ease of feedback process, perceived usefulness of feedback), and organization perceptions (customer orientation and affective commitment). Altruism, gender, and perceived rewards associated with the feedback process did not affect the intention to provide feedback.