C2C interactions in the banking environment

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Introduction

Service encounters, service experiences, and customer journeys are fundamental service research topics within the banking environment (Georgiou et al., 2023; Voorhees et al., 2017; Yadollahi et al., 2019). These service encounters often involve various human actors (Lemon and Verhoef, 2016), such as bank personnel who serve customers directly through bank branches and call centres or indirectly through modern service technologies (non-human actors) like artificial intelligence-enabled self-service kiosks or online service portals. 
More recently, there has also been an increased interest in customers’ interactions with other customers when dealing with banks’ services. Beyond transacting with banks directly, customers also seem to perform an essential role in helping other customers in need of assistance with banks’ service delivery (Fatma et al., 2022; Van Tonder and De Beer, 2018; Van Tonder et al., 2020). These customer-helping behaviours may transpire when banks introduce new service innovations or when customers assist more vulnerable consumers in transacting with the bank. In broad terms, the interactions (when one customer helps another customer) are termed customer-to-customer (C2C) interactions (Heinonen and Nicholls, 2022). 
In bank marketing literature, customer helpers’ roles have further received limited attention to date and have not yet been fully explored (Fatma et al., 2022; Van Tonder and De Beer, 2018; Van Tonder et al., 2020). An advanced understanding of customer-helping behaviour in the banking environment is imperative for several reasons. While bank managers may employ strategies to manage human and non-human actors at various stages of the service experiences (Voorhees et al., 2017), in the absence of service models that explicitly recognise and acknowledge C2C interactions, opportunities to enhance service encounters and experiences and enrich the customer journey may be missed. Moreover, without a more comprehensive understanding of bank customers’ helping behaviour, bank service providers may run the risk of excluding/undermanaging an important embedded human actor within their service delivery conceptualisations and modelling that, through their assistance, may have a profound impact on the service encounters, service experiences, and eventually the customer journeys within the banking environment. 
Given the above perspectives, a new mapping of the service delivery process is needed, providing a more comprehensive view of customers’ involvement in the bank’s service delivery process and their unique contribution to other customers’ service journey.

List of Topic Areas

Besides transacting with the bank directly, customers may also provide help to other customers in dealing with the bank’s services. Moreover, customers’ acts of helping couldbe complex in nature and may involve multiple actors, including customer helpers, gatekeepers, and other members of customer helpers’ support networks. Therefore we seek greater insight into the following matters: 

• To what extent do customers integrate assistance from offline (e.g., family and friends) and online customer helper resources (e.g., social networks) when making decisions throughout the bank service experience?
• Who are the key role players in the customer helper's support network, and to what extent do they support or sabotage the help customer helpers may provide to fellow customers during bank service encounters? 
• To what extent may collective norms of interaction between customer helpers and their support network in online and offline environments influence customers' views of acceptable service standards and shape their expectations of service delivery in the banking environment? 
• Do customer helpers' roles change from merely acting as instructors in the early stages of the service experience to serving as facilitators in the later stages of the service experience? Moreover, to what extent may these behaviours impact customer loyalty towards the bank? 
• To what extent may multi-actor service encounters contribute to a power imbalance during the service delivery process? How do multi-actor service encounters within the banking environment influence customers' relationships with their banks, switching behaviour, and value co-creation practices? What strategies can ensure greater alignment and optimal functioning between all actors involved in the bank's service delivery process? 

This list is not exhaustive and contributions on any other aspects of financial services marketing, which may advance understanding of C2C interactions in the banking environment, are also welcome.

Submissions Information

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Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else, while under review for this journal.

Key Deadlines

Opening date for manuscripts submissions: 01/02/2025 
Closing date for manuscripts submission: 15/02/2025

Guest Editors

Prof Estelle van Tonder, University of South Africa, South Africa, [email protected] 
Dr Stephen Saunders, Monash University, Australia, [email protected]
Prof Jillian Farquhar, Gordon Institute of Business Science, University of Pretoria, South Africa, [email protected]
Prof Naz Onel, Stockton University, United States, [email protected]

References

Fatma, M., Khan, I., Kumar, V. and Shrivastava, A.K. (2022), “Corporate social responsibility and customer-citizenship behaviors: the role of customer-company identification”, European Business Review, Vol. 34 No. 6, pp. 858-875, doi: 10.1108/EBR-12-2021-0250. 
Georgiou, M., Daskou, S., Anastasiou, A. and Siakalli, M. (2023), “The effects of the theory of planned behaviour on the switching propensity of retail banking customers at different critical switching incidents”, International Journal of Bank Marketing, Vol. 41 No. 7, pp. 1872-1898, doi: 10.1108/IJBM-12-2022-0532. 
Heinonen, K. and Nicholls, R. (2022), “Customer-to-customer interactions in service”, in Edvardsson, B. and Tronvoll, B. (Eds), The Palgrave Handbook of Service Management, Springer, Cham, pp. 629-654. 
Lemon, K.N. and Verhoef, P.C. (2016), “Understanding customer experience throughout the customer journey”, Journal of Marketing, Vol. 80 No. 6, pp. 69-96, doi: 10.1509/jm.15.0420. 
Van Tonder, E. and De Beer, L.T. (2018), “New perspectives on the role of customer satisfaction and commitment in promoting customer citizenship behaviours”, South African Journal of Economic and Management Sciences, Vol. 21 No. 1, p. a1894, doi: 10.4102/sajems.v21i1.1894.
Van Tonder, E., Saunders, S.G. and De Beer, L.T. (2020), “A simplified approach to understanding customer support and help during self-service encounters”, International Journal of Quality & Reliability Management, Vol. 37 No. 4, pp. 609-634, doi: 10.1108/IJQRM-06-2019-0198. 
Voorhees, C.M., Fombelle, P.W., Gregoire, Y., Bone, S., Gustafsson, A., Sousa, R. and Walkowiak, T. (2017), “Service encounters, experiences and the customer journey: defining the field and a call to expand our lens”, Journal of Business Research, Vol. 79, pp. 269-280, doi: 10.1016/j.jbusres.2017.04.014. 
van Tonder, E., & Saunders, S. G. (2024). Customer helping behaviour in the banking environment: a gift-giving perspective and research agenda. International Journal of Bank Marketing, (ahead-of-print).
Yadollahi, S., Kazemi, A. and Ranjbarian, B. (2019), “A measurement of service experience at touch points in banking industry: model development and validation”, International Journal of Business Innovation and Research, Vol. 20 No. 3, pp. 337-353, doi: 10.1504/IJBIR.2019.102715.