Managing the boundary spanner - Customer turnover connection

Service-providing boundary spanners are becoming increasingly important in modern organizations. Minimizing the turnover of effective boundary spanners is clearly important, but since some turnover is inevitable, organizations must deal with turnover's consequences as well as its causes. In this article we propose a model for examining and managing one of the most important of those consequences: the increased risk of losing customers as a result of the loss of a boundary spanner who dealt with that customer. In some cases the customer actually follows the boundary spanner to a new organization, in others the loss of the boundary spanner simply prompts the customer to begin searching for alternative service providers. Our model is based on a distinction between customer perceptions of the non-imitability of a firm and the non-imitability of an individual boundary spanner. We present several suggestions as to how two levels of HR managers-the HR executive and the operating level HR manager-can work together to manage the problem.