We examine the effect of internal employee coordination on customer trust, focusing specifically on employees’ responsiveness to each other as an important, quantifiable, and objective aspect of internal coordination. Using proprietary data from a company with exogenous assignment of employees to teams that serve individual customers, we study how inter‐employee responsiveness influences customer trust. Each customer is served via an app‐based group chat by a randomly assigned team of employees. Our data include more than 2 million group chat messages with over 16 thousand customers. We find that inter‐employee responsiveness serves as a credible signal that helps build customer trust, as evidenced by their subsequent contracting choices. The effect is more pronounced when the signal is (1) more frequent and (2) more intense. Our findings highlight the novel value of internal employee responsiveness as a credible signal that helps build trust with external stakeholders.

中文翻译：

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内部员工协调的信号价值

我们研究了内部员工协调对客户信任的影响，特别关注员工之间的响应能力，这是内部协调的一个重要、可量化和客观的方面。使用来自一家公司的专有数据，将员工外生分配到为个人客户服务的团队，我们研究了员工间的响应如何影响客户信任。每个客户都由随机分配的员工团队通过基于应用程序的群聊提供服务。我们的数据包括超过 16,000 名客户的 200 多万条群聊消息。我们发现，员工间的响应能力是一个可靠的信号，有助于建立客户信任，他们随后的合同选择证明了这一点。当信号 （1） 更频繁且 （2） 更强烈时，效果会更加明显。我们的研究结果强调了内部员工响应能力的新价值，即有助于与外部利益相关者建立信任的可靠信号。