The Impact of a Time Gap on the Process of Building a Sustainable Relationship between Employee and Customer Satisfaction

The aim of this paper is to describe the relationships between changes in employee indices (motivation and satisfaction) and customer indices (satisfaction and loyalty) in a single- and multi-term perspective. The article presents the results of primary research conducted in two industries (banking services and shopping centers) during three annual reference periods. The authors used the PLS-SEM method in the analytical process. The results of the research suggest that there is a strong relationship between changes in the areas of employee and customer satisfaction in the studied sectors, with a one-year time shift, which the authors called the "time gap". In addition, it turned out that the strength of influence of the employee's motivation level on customers is clearly lower than the strength of influence of the employee satisfaction. The occurrence of a "time gap" between employee and customer processes suggests that any changes introduced in the area of customer service as well as broadly understood human resource management policy need some time to become sustainable-to be noticed by the market and coded in the minds of the recipients of the offer as the new and currently applicable standard. The article makes a successful attempt at a long-term analysis of the relationship between employees and customers, assuming a time delay between both phenomena. As a result of the conducted research, it was possible to operationalize the discussed relationship in terms of strength and direction as well as the time shift.