Hypotheses of direct effects

Social relations with customers are an important means to foster customer orientation, as they increase information processing of customer needs (Korhonen-Sande 2010 Schlosser and McNau ton 2007). For customers, especially social (personal recognition, friendship] and relational (trust confidence) rewards are important to keep up ties with firms (Gwinner et aL 1998). I argue that these kinds of relationships arc 

HI User embeddedness of employees is posiOvefy related to a) customer 

Experience in sales situations has been shown to be a predictor of customer orientation, as Franke and Park show in a meta-study (Franke and Park 2006). They claim experience with sales leads to a greater ability to identify ways to help satisfy customer needs (Pranke and Park 2006, p. 696]. The same argumentation holds for the assertion that use experience will also foster customer orientation. By using product themselves, employees get to know customer needs and problems directly in a first-hand experience. They also built implicit need knowledge. This, in turn, will help to better understand customer needs, which is an important dimension of customer orientation (Brown et al. 2002]. Homburg et al. (2009] provide empirical support for the positive correlation between customer orientations of employees and need knowledge. 

The consequences of use experience in the theoretical model can be hypothesized as follows  

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Figure 8 CoiHxpiiial framewoik for the sliiibr 2.2 Hypotheses of direct effects...

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