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Happy Users, Grumpy Bosses: Current Community Engagement Literature and the Impact of Support Engagement in a B2B Setting on User and Upper Management Satisfaction

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Customer Engagement Marketing

Abstract

Managerial interest in facilitating online communities is thriving. We provide an overview of the current literature on community engagement from which we conclude that community engagement is investigated in various settings (in B2B and B2C environments), with various purposes (e.g., product support, brand communities), and shows somewhat mixed outcomes. Also, outcomes of community engagement are always investigated at the individual user level, even in B2B settings. However, in B2B networks there are often multiple layers within one organization, as the individual who uses a community is often distinct from the individual(s) responsible for purchase decisions. In the empirical part of our chapter, we go beyond the individual user by investigating how both users and upper management value the various ways their organization obtains customer support.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    To be concise throughout this manuscript, we use the term “user” to denote the customer support user. In a B2B setting, the support user is not necessarily the product user. It occurs that product users contact an internal support department within their customer organization, which in turn contacts (i.e., uses the support of) the service provider.

  2. 2.

    In practice both users and upper-level managers will (partially) pursue their organization’s interest and (partially) their own job function and career interest. Despite this communality the main insight here is that upper-level managers and users have different job functions bearing different responsibilities: an important part of upper-level managers’ job function is to have a long-term strategic focus and make sure their staff members are acting in their organization’s best interest. In contrast, an important part of the users’ job function is to have a short-term, day-to-day orientation and solve daily support issues.

  3. 3.

    Since we log-transformed our independent variables we essentially estimated a level-log model. We also re-estimated our model after log-transforming our dependent variable and hence investigated a log-log model. Results of the log-log model are substantially very similar to the results of the reported level-log model.

  4. 4.

    We also estimated our model with an orthogonal rotation method. Results are similar, only exception is the diminished significance (from 5% to 10% significance level) of the effect of active community usage on upper management satisfaction.

  5. 5.

    We also compared whether the satisfaction implications of various support channels differ between users and upper-level managers by means of a pooled regression with interaction effects between job level and support channel. Results indicate that upper-level managers do not differ in their reaction towards service request activity (β service requests * upper-level managers = 0.02, n.s.), become dissatisfied instead of satisfied from online knowledge consultation (β online knowledge consultation * upper-level managers = −0.16, p < 0.05), and do not differ in their reaction towards active community support usage (β active community usage * upper-level managers = −0.04, n.s.)

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands

    Sander F. M. Beckers, Jenny van Doorn & Peter C. Verhoef

  2. Utah State University, Logan, UT, USA

    Sterling A. Bone & Kristal R. Ray

  3. Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA

    Paul W. Fombelle

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  1. Sander F. M. Beckers
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  2. Sterling A. Bone
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  3. Paul W. Fombelle
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  4. Jenny van Doorn
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  5. Peter C. Verhoef
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  6. Kristal R. Ray
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Foster School of Business, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA

    Robert W. Palmatier

  2. Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

    V. Kumar

  3. Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida, USA

    Colleen M. Harmeling

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Beckers, S.F.M., Bone, S.A., Fombelle, P.W., van Doorn, J., Verhoef, P.C., Ray, K.R. (2018). Happy Users, Grumpy Bosses: Current Community Engagement Literature and the Impact of Support Engagement in a B2B Setting on User and Upper Management Satisfaction. In: Palmatier, R., Kumar, V., Harmeling, C. (eds) Customer Engagement Marketing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61985-9_7

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