Some insights into customer orientation: an investigation of salespeople in Taiwan

Abstract

Despite the claim that prosocial service behavior ratings influence sales performance (SP), an empirical discrepancy exists in relating prosocial service behavior ratings to actual SP. Furthermore, studies have seldom considered prescribed role and prosocial service behaviors together as important factors in influencing customer attitudes and SP. This article fills this void by examining the relative contribution of prescribed role and prosocial service behavior. Effective triadic data from 37 sales managers, 418 business customers, and 122 SP archives are used for exploring the relationships between customer-oriented behaviors and customer outcomes [customer satisfaction (CS) and loyalty intent] and percentage of sales quota attained. The principal results generally indicate that business customers place greater values on prosocial service behavior in predicting SP and CS, and that CS partially mediates the relationship between prescribed role service behavior and outcome variables.

Keywords:

• customer orientation
• prescribed role
• prosocial service behavior
• sales performance

Acknowledgements

I appreciate the financial support from Chang Gung University, under Grant Project CMRP340022-I & -II. I thank the blind reviewer for helpful comments on the article.