Nature, elements and process of customer orientation: Evidences from service front line

Abstract

The research study is an attempt to understand how customer orientation happens in an organization particularly with reference to the role of front line. Critical Incident Technique was employed to collect stories of customer oriented responses from the front end managers of twenty interactive services organizations. The collected stories were analyzed and interpreted to capture the nature, elements and process of front end initiated customer oriented response. The responses were found to be systemic, localized and benefit driven in nature. Managerial initiative, system support and frontline participation were the elements which contributed to customer orientation. The process involved followed a generic decision making model with sequential steps of awareness, authentication, alternative generation, evaluation, response design, trial implementation, full scale implementation, and impact assessment and communication. The paper provides a detailed study of the need for nurturing the leadership and Mekoth, N.

Barnabas, N.initiative of the front line manager. Further, the current study should enlighten the top management of service organization that many customer oriented response initiation and implementation can occur at the grass root level within the organization rather than out of the vision of the top management.