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Introduction: why feedback?
On the customer side, genuine engagement extends the boundary of the organization's culture to include the customer as a member who shares in both the commercial and psychological life of the organization. Understanding how to create engaged customers is needed for theory and research. (Ostrom et al. , 2010, p. 10).
Verhoef et al. (2010) cite that the Marketing Science Institute considers customer engagement as one of the top priorities for research today, and it was the topic of a Journal of Service Research special issue 2010, but customer engagement is still in its infancy as a research stream, with most of the work largely conceptual. Customer engagement is conceived as all non-transactional customer behaviors that can affect a firm (Verhoef et al. , 2010). Related literature on engagement often includes customer-to-customer behavior such as word-of-mouth (WOM) and advocacy. In contrast to customer-to-customer communication, the engagement literature devotes much less attention to customer-to-business communication such as customer feedback (Verhoef et al. , 2010 left feedback out of their conceptual model).
Researchers have argued that advocacy is one of the most important outcomes of building customer engagement (Walz and Celuch, 2010; Christopher et al. , 1991). Advocacy involves the promotion or defense of a company, product or brand by a customer to another customer (Bendapudi and Berry, 1997). Advocacy helps extend a firm's promotional budget and is therefore an important non-transactional customer behavior to understand. However, a case can be made that customer feedback (both positive and negative) is no less important, and may be more important given that advocacy mainly affects the promotional budget, whereas feedback can provide insight into what a company is doing right and wrong in terms of any of the marketing mix including people and processes (Robinson, 2011). In the hierarchy of valued customer behavior, while satisfied and repeat customers are "good" and customers who promote and defend your brand may be "better"; customers who provide feedback to improve or create future value for the organization which bolsters its competitive advantage may be the "best" (Robinson, 2011). Empirical work in the area of customer engagement has not explained a large amount of variance in the feedback construct particularly when compared to advocacy behavior research (Walz and Celuch,...