“Treat your employees fairly, so they will treat your customers fairly, and this will be more profitable for everyone.” It is the new mantra of service management that researchers Volker Kuppelwieser, Phil Klaus, Yeruda Baruch and Aikaterini Manthiou advocate for in Recherche et Applications en Marketing. They aim to consider fairness as the cornerstone of customer experience management.
Their analysis is in line with the managerial principle of the symmetry of attention generalized in France by Charles Ditandy and Benoît Meyronin, according to which customer-firm relationship quality is the mirror of the firm’s relationship with its employees.
Loyalty rhymes with fairness
Whether we talk about employees or customers, their perception of being treated fairly by the firm is essential. Indeed, the solidity of the psychological contract linking them to the firm is based on this perception. On contrary, even a punctual lack of fairness can lead to the end of this contract.
From “you” firm to “me” customer or employee, a contract in mind, not just on paper
The notion of psychological contract makes it possible to understand how people internalize relational patterns, largely implicit, concerning the rules and modus vivendi that govern their relationship with a given firm, employer, or brand. This notion is even more interesting in the context of numerous studies showing a strong link between the quality of commitment to the organization and the strength of the psychological contract that binds a person to that organization.
For employees, a strong psychological contract promotes a sense of identification with the organization, job satisfaction and, consequently, loyalty to the employer. From a customer’s perspective, a psychological contract based on the trust toward the brand will lead to relational satisfaction and committed loyalty, specifically expressed through positive word-of-mouth.
Fairness in 3D
If employees and customers are committed to a fair treatment, it is good to remember that they are extra sensitive to the same dimensions of justice. Thus, the perception of fairness will depend on three components: distributive justice (balance between contributions and rewards of the person), procedural justice (fairness of procedures determining the terms of the exchange) and interactional justice (quality of interpersonal communications). These three components thus constitute different levers that can be activated by the firm to strengthen the solidity of the psychological contract with its customers and employees.
From internal equity to the customer experience
Another strength of equity management is that the intra-organizational equity can disseminate among customers. The mechanisms underlying the transformation of internal equity into external one result from the emotional commitment of employees who, after experiencing a fair treatment, will try hard to behave conscientiously and altruistically towards customers. The customer experience is then enriched by perceptions of procedural and interactional justice, which ultimately help customers feel a fair treatment. On the contrary, employees who do not get fair treatment from the organization re-examine their relationship with their employer and decide to limit their implications towards customers to what is contractually binding, thus significantly degrading customer’s experience and perceptions of justice.
In services, customer experience management therefore requires a 360 ° equity approach, QED. Convinced by the demonstration? In this case, think about Step 2 of the reasoning: what happens to 360 ° equity when the customer journey is connected, and the customer experience is augmented?
Kuppelwieser, V. G., Klaus, P., Baruch, Y., & Manthiou, A. (2018). The missing link: Fairness as the ultimate determinant of service profitability?!. Recherche et Applications en Marketing (English Edition), 33(2), 46-74.
Translated by Anna MARDUMYAN, from the original post in French by Françoise SIMON
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