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This empirical research paper replicates, extends and discusses Hennig-Thurau's customer orientation of service employees (COSE) concept. It follows the framework of the original model, but focuses on two different services. The paper uses a structural equation model and newly collected data to examine the relationships proposed by Hennig-Thurau. In addition, the COSE model is extended using several control variables. The results demonstrate that the COSE model as proposed by Hennig-Thurau does not hold under differing research contexts and is therefore not universally applicable. Furthermore, the proposed factors of COSE are not found in the sample examined here, and the findings also show that the inclusion of control variables leads to ambiguous results. To identify universally applicable models and to allow for meta-analyses, this paper attempts to generalise Hennig-Thurau's COSE model. When …