The Impact of Perceived Listening Behavior in Voice-to-Voice Service Encounters

SUMMARY Call centers have become an important customer access channel as well as an important source of customer-related information. This boundary-spanning unit has finally enabled companies to take marketing's commonplace wisdom of listening to the customer literally. As a result of the fact that an increasing number of companies are now actively embracing the notion of interactivity, there has been a considerable growth in the number of so-called voice-to-voice service encounters. These encounters require specific knowledge and skills of boundary spanning service workers. One essential skill is listening behavior. Yet, this communication skill has not been widely addressed in the marketing literature. Therefore, the focus in this paper is on the concept of listening behavior and its consequences for firm – customer relationships. Three dimensions of listening behavior are discerned; attentiveness, perceptiveness and responsiveness. An empirical study was designed to test the effect of these behavioral dimensions on customer satisfaction with the service encounter, the level of customer trust and the intention to contact the firm again. Results of the study reveal that attentiveness is a direct driver of encounter satisfaction, whereas perceptiveness is primarily related to trust. Furthermore, the responsiveness dimension is related positively to both satisfaction and trust. In addition, we find a significant association between satisfaction and trust and, finally, both a satisfactory evaluation of the voice-to-voice encounter and the build-up of trust have a significant impact on the customer's intention to contact the call center again in the future.