Conclusion
Customers and employees enable firms to achieve sustained competitive advantage. Engaged customers and employees, in many ways, are the fundamental determinants of managerial success versus firm failure. Given the complex, reciprocal, and multilateral relationships between the related constructs, understanding the joint association of customer engagement and employee engagement and their effects on firm performance is critical for marketing scholars and managers alike. An improved understanding of these dynamics will provide firms with more concise guidance with regard to formulating appropriate marketing strategies and will enable firms to induce synergistic associations among customers, employees, and the management.
The current chapter has reviewed extant research on the association between customer engagement and employee engagement and the relationship of these two constructs with firm performance. The review suggests the need to develop clearer measures of customer engagement and employee engagement that tap the core concepts, to apply a theoretical perspective that may combine existing perspectives on the links between these constructs, and to generalize previous findings in different contexts to find important boundary conditions and moderators of these links. We also call for alternative approaches to data collection that lead to more consistent measures and stronger causal inferences. We encourage marketing scholars to further investigate these issues to enhance this classic, yet timeless, research area.
