Abstract:

In the highly competitive market environment, the competitive advantage brought by knowledge about customers has been widely recognized. As the acquisition of customer knowledge often rely on front-line staff, this paper explores the antecedents of customer need knowledge of front-line employees. Matched data from 235 employees and 235 customers was collected from thirty-four retail stores of international travel agency located in Guangdong and Guangxi provinces. Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) was adopted and showed that the level of customer need knowledge were positively associated with employee service orientation and the degree of customer value co-creation, the degree of customer value co-creation partially mediated the relationship between service orientation and employees’ customer need knowledge. In addition, by constructing a hierarchical moderating effect model, this paper also found that interaction orientation positively moderated the relationship between customer value co-creation and customer need knowledge. The study concluded with a discussion of theoretical and managerial implication.

Key words: Customer need knowledge (CNK), Service orientation, Degree of customer value co-creation, Interaction orientation