On the Role of Empathy in Customer-Employee Interactions

By J. Wieseke, A. Geigenmüller, Florian Kraus. 2012

368 citations recorded by the source corpus.

While the service literature repeatedly emphasizes the role of empathy in service interactions, studies on empathy in customer-employee interactions are nearly absent. This study defines and conceptualizes employee and customer empathy as multidimensional constructs and empirically investigates their impact on customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. A quantitative study based on dyadic data and a multilevel modeling approach finds support for two effects of empathy in service interactions. The study reveals that customer empathy strengthens the positive effect of employee empathy on customer satisfaction, leading to more “symbiotic interactions.” The findings also indicate that empathic customers are more likely to respond to a dissatisfying encounter with “forgiveness,” in the sense that customer empathy is able to mitigate negative effects of customer dissatisfaction on customer loyalty. From these empirical results, the authors derive several implications for service research and the management of service encounters. In particular, the present study provides a valuable basis for strategies of “interaction routing,” that is, matching customers and employees on the basis of their psychological profiles to create smooth and satisfying service interactions. The authors elaborate on approaches to implement this strategy in service organizations.

Subfields: Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1bf2c3946072f8a500256ed919ba02648361ac22

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In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Impact of Service Quality on Customer Satisfaction and Customer Loyalty: Evidence from Banking Sector (2014, background): “Wieseke et al. (2012) empirically investigated the role of empathy in service quality and its impact on customer satisfaction.”
Engaging and retaining customers with AI and employee service (2020, neutral): “The importance of empathy manifested in service employees has been widely acknowledged in prior studies (Prentice et al., 2013, 2014; Wieseke et al., 2012).”
Customer experience challenges: bringing together digital, physical and social realms (2018, background): “Researchers have suggested that employee emotional competence, employee–customer rapport and matching employee–customer empathy influence the customer experience and business outcomes (Delcourt et al., 2013; Gremler and Gwinner, 2000; Wieseke et al., 2012).”
Service robot implementation: a theoretical framework and research agenda (2019, background): “In particular, empathy is essential to employee – customer service encounters (Wieseke, Geigenmüller, & Kraus, 2012), but it represents an extremely high level of service robot a ﬀ ective achievement (Huang & Rust, 2018).”
Exploring customers' responses to online service failure and recovery strategies during Covid‐19 pandemic: An actor–network theory perspective (2021, background): “Customers may often empathize with employees and firms by considering their perspectives and intentions during a service interaction (Bove, 2019; Wieseke et al., 2012).”
Effect of employee empathy on customer satisfaction and loyalty during employee–customer interactions: The mediating role of customer affective commitment and perceived service quality (2018, background): “Empathic employees with general recognition of customer requirements adjust their behaviors toward specific customers, rendering to each customer personalized assistance (Wieseke et al., 2012) resulting in higher CS.”