Employee-to-Customer Improvisation: A Value Creation Strategy for Navigating the Contemporary Consumption Experience

The potential contribution that employees can make to retail firms is changing as retailing is increasingly embracing online and digital capabilities. Retailers are tasked with the role of supplementing their primary commercial role by providing unique experiences. Existing theories in service management, for example, job autonomy and service scripting, can only provide part of the solution to the inevitable variability that emerges as employees work with customers to proactively create moments of delight and reactively recover from service failures. The importance of customer service and the customer experience is becoming critical. We propose a new concept of employee-to-customer improvisation, which draws on the strengths of existing theoretical approaches while providing retail managers with fresh insights. We clarify the domain of the employee-to-customer improvisation construct and propose a conceptual framework that integrates individual and organizational antecedents, as well as contingency factors that enable employee-to-customer improvisation. Overall, our work highlights a new concept important to meeting the changing demands associated with contemporary retail encounters.