Don’t forget about your customer: Examining museums’ organizational change through the Service-Dominant approach

Acknowledging that service organizations’ competitiveness increasingly relies on an effective management of customers’ demands, this paper departs from the importance for them to build effective relationships with their service users. Hence, being highly customer-oriented allows firms to provide a superior customer experience and benefit from their higher satisfaction with the service. But how can these organizations keep a high customer orientation over time in the face of the ever-changing customers’ needs? Grounding on the Service-Dominant Logic (SDL), this work proposes to build both a strong organizational and employees’ customer orientation by placing emphasis on institutional, organizational, and individual factors. We test our model within the context of museums, because of their distinguishing feature as “fully experiential tourism products” as well as the organizational change they are facing since some decades which is leading them to turn their cultural wealth into profit. Survey data collected from 13 Tuscan museums show that a higher organizational support (organizational factor) significantly improves both the organizational and the employees’ customer orientation while the use of procedures (institutional factor) and the individuals’ knowledge self-efficacy (individual factor) are positively associated only with the organizational customer orientation.