دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی تأثیرات مخرب ناشی از دخالت مشتری در نیروی فروش کسب و کار تا مصرف کننده - اشپرینگر 2017

Introduction

Customer engagement (CE) is an increasingly studied topic in marketing that relates to the attitudes, behaviors, and connectedness of customers to a firm and to the firm’s other customers (i.e., the marketplace; see Kumar et al. 2010; Kumar and Pansari 2016; Van Doorn et al. 2010). CE has become an important topic because it reflects the increased ease with which business-to-consumer (B2C) customers (largely empowered by new technology) can engage with firms and other customers outside of face-to-face interactions. Overall, this is seen as a positive change—firms want better access to, and deeper relationships with, customers, and technology-driven CE facilitates this (Kumar and Pansari 2016). However, this development brings with it uncertainty regarding the future of B2C salespeople and the organizations that employ them because, traditionally, the sales force has been a firm’s primary method of engaging customers. Research by Beatty and Smith (1987), for example, showed that in the past the bulk of a customer’s external information search came from in-person sales interactions. However, more recent work suggests that this is no longer the case, as customers now enter sales interactions much later (57–70% of the way through decision) and after considerable prior engagement (Microsoft 2015). With customers now entering sales interactions highly engaged and informed, the question is, where does this leave the B2C salesperson?

Proposed Solution

The themes described by our focus group participants do not bode well for salespeople of firms that promote CE outside of the sales interaction. Yet, most agree that promoting CE behaviors is positive for firm performance. And, regardless of if a firm actively promotes CE, most agree that customers will seek out engagement with the marketplace, if not the firm directly. Thus, we conclude this chapter by proposing some solutions to this dilemma. But first, we add that the comments provided by our focus group likely reflect a larger issue in sales, which simply put is that B2C sales interactions are rapidly changing. Many firms that experienced positive results from sales activities in the past are not assured that those same approaches will be effective today. Thus, our proposed solutions are theoretically based on the mechanisms that underlie the current problem. As identified, we suggest that in B2C sales, the regulatory focus of customers is the main underlying theme. Thus, we focus specifically on how a salesperson performing the KB role can address these problems based on regulatory focus theory.