Mastering care management strategies to improve retailing: Mechanisms, capabilities, impacts and emerging opportunities

The dramatic changes in the past three years forced retailers to revise their business. For instance, the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 pushed them to embrace more digital/online channels to avoid lockdown and shut down, to revisit their supply chain to cope with the frequent stockpiling, to reconsider store layout and in store strategies to reduce crowdedness and consumers’ uncomforting, etc. (Pantano et al., 2020; Roggeveen and Sethuraman, 2020), consumers largely changed behaviors, habits, and preferences. For instance, the favorite place for shopping changed, as well as the expenditure in certain goods like luxury compared to more essential products, the willingness to queue in front of the stores for buying, etc. (Park et al., 2022). Also, consumers started feeling insecure, suffering the risk of contagion when shopping, the need of social distancing, and the fear of products contamination and scarcity (Hamilton, 2021; Islam et al., 2021; Laato et al., 2020; Gupta and Coskun, 2021; Pantano et al., 2021), which further lead to aggressive behaviours like aggression towards retail workers, for instance when products were limited or not available, or when obliged to wear covering face masks, etc. (Woodside, 2020; Northington et al., 2021). Thus, retail workers witnessed many harassments in the stores. For instance, they reported verbal and physical harassments of consumers who did not want to follow the rules (i.e., constraints towards the compulsory covering face mask, number of consumers allowed simultaneously, number of goods available to buy per household, etc.), while rewards to retail workers have scarcely been given (for instance in terms of pay rise). In the other hand, consumers showed a limited customer care by retailers during the pandemic like delays in deliveries, returns process via physical stores not in place, direct contact with retailers suspended and replaced by automatic chatbots, etc. Thus, the concerns of retail workers and consumers, and the intensifying of retail workers stressors (e.g., risk of aggression by consumers, increased duties, and responsibilities with no pay rise and benefits, etc.) highlighted the emergent need of the development of care management systems and procedures also in retail settings.

Care management is considered crucial in other sectors to reduce the high level of concern in workers caused by stressors, while evaluating the need to introduce additional resources as new staff, along with news practices to reward and train workers for their engagement in appropriate behaviors and provide care towards consumers (Northington et al., 2021). For instance, literature largely focused on the (i) impact of (health) information technology to improve customer satisfaction (Devaraj and Kohli, 2000; Davidson and Heslinga, 2007; Gardner et al., 2019; Sreejesh et al., 2021; Binci et al., 2022) and operational efficiency (by also adopting Lean methodologies established in management) (Radnor et al., 2012), (ii) evaluation of the effectiveness of care management services (Laato et al., 2020; Chi et al., 2004; Kirkpatrick et al., 2019), and (iii) importance of leadership strategies that might embrace leader inclusiveness (Mitchell et al., 2015) and implement strategic change (Caldwell et al., 2008). Thus, there are different approaches, norms and technologies that can enhance satisfaction in retail workers and consumers, while improving overall retail management. However, scholars in marketing and retailing so far have paid only little attention to the importance of care management for retail workers and consumers.

Thus, this Special issue investigates the inner mechanisms, capabilities, impacts and emerging opportunities to master care management in retailing embracing the perspective consumers, employees, and retailers. Accordingly, the five contributions presented in this Special issue concentrate their efforts on providing a shared definition of care management in retailing. Each paper provides guidance and suggestions for retailers and actors in the retail industry to enhance the understanding of the role played by the introduction of care management in daily activities for both retail workers and consumers.

Specifically, in the first contribution, Raggiotto and colleagues (2023) investigates how care management strategies help retailers to proactively react to the uncertain competitive environment, improving in-store experiences across two studies, one with consumers and the other with employees. Results demonstrate the relevance of customer and retail employees’ empowerment to keeping in-store dysfunctional behaviours under control and leading to satisfaction.

Then, the paper by Mayr and Teller (2023) explores retailers' difficulties in retaining employees during the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, in that period employees experienced emotional exhaustion and poor behaviour from customers. A survey with 108 frontline employees in retail stores shows the needed attention to emotional care in the form of interpersonal emotion management strategies, the supervisor's roleand trust-enhancing mechanisms in retail care management, to mitigate negative effects on retail workers.

In the third contribution, Priporas et al., 2023 investigate the increasing importance of customising care management during crises to address mental volatility. In this vein, the authors create a toolkit specific to crisis-sensitive care management protocol. Results further show how the risk of mental burnout in a volatile environment such as during the COVID-19 pandemic, along with potential stressors for both consumers and employees. Consequently, the authors emphasise the importance for retailers to take ad hoc actions to limit these issues, with emphasis on personalized solutions rather than standardised ones.

In the fourth paper, Vannucci et al., 2023 depict customer care activities as the process used by retailers to satisfy consumers' needs. Specifically, results of two experimental studies show that the number and framing of customer care activities affect customer orientation perceptions (Study 1), whereas their fit with the overall retailer's image and the level of professionalism required to carry them out affects store patronage intentions (Study 2).

In the last contribution, Rodríguez-Priego and colleagues (2023) examine the main determinants of online self-disclosure and its relationship with customer care. The authors investigate the extent to which retailers could implement strategies to make consumers perceive engagement towards their feelings. Specifically, this study highlights the role exercised by perceived customer care in making customers have control of how their data are managed, showing that the more retailers make them feel cared, the greater the control customer perceive over their personal data.

The above-mentioned contributions provide suggestions and guidance for managers to enhance the knowledge of how retailers can introduce care management strategies in their business. Specifically, these implications can be grouped in 4 main areas (Fig. 1 ): (i) improving and consumers and retail workers feeling of being understood, (ii) improving the sense of importance for the retail company, and (iii) improving communications skills. Retailers are encouraged to increase the attention to consumers and retail workers feeling, by making them feel integrative part of the value creation process, through developing regular conversation with retail workers about their feelings and wellbeing and collecting and taking into consideration consumers feeling and wellbeing (at least when in the store premises). Being part of a constant and important conversation with retailers would make consumers and retail workers feeling cared.

Fig. 1.

Main managerial implications from the adoption of care management.

Making consumers feel important for the retail company would result in making them feel part of the whole care management strategic plan. Thus, retailers should address the individual role played by consumers in this plan. For instance, consumers level of confidence increases when they perceive that the company cares for them. This implication is strictly related to the need of improvement of communication skills, in order to improve consumers response. Specifically, retailers should revise their message to better communicate the importance that they give to consumers, and the care that they provide to both consumers and retail workers. Indeed, the high sense of retail workers' professionalism influence consumers’ perception, while different types of communications should be devoted to communicate the specific care management activities.

In addition to the suggested implications, we believe there are also relevant new lines of inquiry for future research in care management for retailing that can be grouped in four main themes: (i) assessing and managing consumers and retail workers empowerment, (ii) reducing negative consumer deviance, (iii) integrating advanced technologies, with emphasis on artificial intelligence (AI) to support care management strategies and operations, and (iv) increasing retailers’ readiness to revisit/adopt care management strategies.

Due to the interesting theoretical and managerial contributions offered by this Special Issue, we hope that our effort will represent just a start in marketing science to expand knowledge on care management and the different lenses that authors investigated in the abovementioned papers. To this end, the research agenda presented in Table 1 provides some guidelines to inspire researchers and managers in contributing to the further understanding of the care management scenario in marketing and retailing, pushing academics to contribute to the creation of new models and theories related to this topic.

Table 1.

Summary of the future research directions and the related exemplar research questions.

Research Directions	Exemplar Research Questions
Strategies to assess and manage consumers and retail workers empowerment	1.How can retail workers satisfaction influence, and be influenced by, consumers satisfaction? 2.How does empowerment vary according to different personality traits of retail workers and consumers (e.g., attitude toward power) and what are the specific consequences for their satisfaction? 3.What are the effect of consumers VS retail workers empowerment on retail performance? 4.How can consumer-retailer workers relationship increase empowerment?
Strategies to reduce negative consumer deviance	1.How can retailers measure limit negative customer deviance (including verbal abuse, threats, harassment and violence against retail workers) and how to limit its effects on retail workers wellbeing? 2.What is the impact of customer deviance on retail performance? 3.What kind of systems should retailers integrate to ensure the tradeoff between resources needed to reduce negative deviance and increased retail performance? 4.How can consumers-retail workers relationships under consumer deviance be assessed?
Strategies integrate advanced technologies, with emphasis on artificial intelligence (AI) to support care management strategies and operations	1.What kind of advanced technology would best support the care management strategies and operations and how these can be selected? How can AI support in this sense? 2.What usages of advanced retail technology predict the highest efficiency of care management strategies and operations? 3.Which kind of advanced generate most value for retailers, retail workers and for consumers? 4.To what extent can AI provide additional care of consumers and retail workers?
Strategies to improve retailers' readiness to revisit/adopt care management	1.How can retailers measure consumers' and retail workers expectations of caring strategies and meet them accordingly? 2.How can retailers address the (un)efficiency of their actual care management strategies? 3.What kind of plans should retailers integrate to always ensure the progress of the care management strategy? 4.How can retailers' readiness to implement new care management strategies?

Data availability

No data was used for the research described in the article.