Rethinking Customer Service Digitalization: Incongruent Frames and Alignment Mechanisms in Retailing

This multilevel study investigates customer service digitalization (CSD), the customer-facing transformation of service processes through digital technologies, in retailing through fifty-two expert interviews with twenty-seven headquarters (HQ) managers, eleven store managers (SMs), and fourteen frontline employees (FLEs). Grounded in a theories-in-use approach and guided by Technology Framing Theory (TFT), the study identifies systematic framing differences between HQ and stores. While HQ managers frame CSD as digitalization, human augmentation, and a continuous “journey,” FLEs perceive CSD as digitization, human substitution, and a fixed “destination.” As boundary spanners between HQ and FLEs, SMs can reinforce these frames and are seen as either enablers or barriers. The study introduces four collective congruence framing mechanisms (CCFMs), namely Ba, Psychological Safety, Redundancies, and Nudging, that buffer the negative consequences of frame incongruence on CSD success and, ultimately, customer service interaction quality; SM boundary spanning strengthens their effectiveness. These findings extend TFT to a multi-actor, multilevel service context. For managers, they suggest diagnosing frame incongruence before rollout, deploying CCFM instantiations such as HQ store days or temporary redundancies, and developing SMs as translators between HQ strategy and frontline practice.