The Service Encounter: Diagnosing Favorable And Unfavorable

An attempt is made to gain an understanding of the particular events and related behaviors of contact employees that cause customers to distinguish very satisfactory services from very unsatisfactory ones. Hotels, restaurants, and airlines were selected as representative of high-contact services in which contact employees' communication skills are particularly important. Seventy-five students interviewed a convenience sample of customers and collected a total of 719 incidents. The initial sorting of the incidents resulted in 3 major groups of employee behaviors that could account for all satisfactory and unsatisfactory incidents: 1. employee response to service delivery system failures, 2. employee response to customer needs and requests, and 3. unprompted and unsolicited employee actions. Categories within groups included response to unavailable or unreasonably slow service, response to special needs of customers, employee behavior in the context of cultural norms, and exemplary performance under adverse circumstances.