A case study of hotel frontline employees' customer need knowledge relating to value co-creation

Based on the value co-creation perspective, this research explores the antecedents of customer need knowledge from perspectives of employees and customers. Furthermore, the role of customer need knowledge in the value co-creation process is explored. Data from the five hotels include customers in different categories and frontline service employees doing different jobs. With support from the managers of five hotels, paired-questionnaire data (an employee with a customer) were collected. In the end, there were 342 usable matched customer-employee questionnaires. SEM shows accumulating customer need knowledge, CNK, was fostered by employee adaptability (EA) and customer participation (CP) and CNK caused employee relational value (ERV) and customer relational value (CRV). This research provides evidence a better service performance is the result of the interactions between employees and customers. However, consider the guidance that hotels should educate and motivate their frontline employees through job training and incentives so that employees can be and are willing to be more flexible in dealing with various situations. This study makes a theoretical contribution to the hospitality literature by providing findings on the antecedents of frontline employees' customer need knowledge in high-star rated hotels.