Customer response toward employees’ emotional labor in service industry settings

In the current study, we develop and test a moderated mediation model that explores the mechanisms that underlie the influence of employees' emotional labor on customer loyalty by considering affective reactions and cognitive appraisals simultaneously and illustrating moderating factors that alter their effectiveness. A sample of 259 individuals from across the United States over 20 years old were recruited on Amazon's Mechanical Turk to participate in the survey. Our emotions as social information based model clarifies the distinct roles of customers' detection of employees' deep acting and surface acting in influencing customers' affective reactions and cognitive appraisals. The current research also reveals that impact of customers' detection of employees' emotional labor on customer outcomes varies as a function of the employees' nonverbal communication.     

More than a mere cup of coffee: When perceived luxuriousness triggers Chinese customers’ perceptions of quality and self-congruity

While prior research shows that atmospheric cues such as visual design trigger customers' cognition and emotions, thus leading to approach-avoidance responses, this article proposes self-congruity as a mediator, paralleling cognitive evaluation (i.e., perceived quality). More specifically, this article, situated in the context of the coffee shop industry in China, investigates how perceived luxuriousness, reflected from the service provider's visual design, affects customers' willingness to pay a price premium (WTPP). The findings show that perceived luxuriousness leads to customers' inferences of high quality of the coffee and high self-congruity, thus increasing WTPP. Further, cosmopolitanism moderates the effect of perceived luxuriousness only via self-congruity, but not via perceived quality. This article contributes to the existing literature on atmospherics, self-congruity, brand equity, and cosmopolitanism. More importantly, this article provides managerial implications for global coffee/food brands that aim to set up their chain outlets and expand rapidly in China, one of the largest emerging markets.     

Retail customers' self-awareness: The deindividuation effects of others

The presence of others often affects retail shopping behavior. Other customers tend to increase one's self-awareness and cause negative self-conscious emotions. This research's findings suggest fellow customers also mitigate focal customers' evaluative concerns. Deindividuation theory, which posits that other customers create anonymity and reduce self-awareness, helps explain this phenomenon. A laboratory experiment and a quasi-experimental field study in a retail setting support the notion that the presence of other customers creates a deindividuation effect on a focal customer during unwanted social evaluation from salespeople. Results show a small group of other customers resulted in lower levels of emotional discomfort and behavioral inhibition than either an empty store or a larger group size, suggesting a U shape relationship.     

The role of memorable experience and emotional intelligence in senior customer loyalty to geriatric hotels

Drawing on service encounters and experiential marketing theories, this study examined the relationship between geriatric service, memorable experience, emotional intelligence, and senior customers' attitudinal and behavioural responses. The research was conducted at geriatric hotels in Portugal. The results showed that, compared to impersonal encounters, employee service has a significantly greater effect on customer satisfaction, memorable experience, and customer loyalty. In addition, customers' memorable experiences mediated the relationship between different service encounters and organisational outcomes. However, customers’ emotional intelligence had minimal effects on these relationships. The discussion and implications of these findings are offered to researchers and practitioners.     

Detection of potential customers’ empathy behavior towards customers' reviews

The aim of the current study is to identify potential customers' empathy behavior and their behavioral reactions based on appraisal and stimulus–organism–response (SOR) theories to customers' reviews of financial services firms using lexicon-based unsupervised learning techniques. After filtering, we obtained 30263 reviews from the Yelp dataset of financial service companies. We examined the connections between several sorts of emotional dimensions and different types of behavioral reactions of potential consumers using lexicon-based unsupervised machine learning methods. Our findings show that the various types of customer sentiment have a significant impact on potential customers' emotional experiences on social media platforms, prompting them to behave differently. Furthermore, potential consumers' reactions to the customers' reviews varied according to their seven emotional aspects. The study is the first to examine the impact of potential customers' empathetic behavioral reactions on customers' evaluations using lexicon-based unsupervised learning techniques.     

The effect of interior color on customers’ aesthetic perception,emotion, and behavior in the luxury service

This study examined the role of color in a luxury service setting. To understand the effect of color, this study investigated how each dimension of color (hue, saturation, or value) contributed to customers' aesthetic perceptions of a luxury hotel room. We interpreted customers' emotional and behavioral responses to a luxury hotel room painted various colors by applying the S–O–R model. The results showed that muted and bright colors encouraged both classical and expressive aesthetic perceptions within the same hue. Moreover, the results indicated that customers' aesthetic perceptions influenced their approach response through feelings of pleasure and dominance in the luxury hotel context that was moderated by their luxury consumption motivation. This study extends the previous literature by elucidating the process by which color affects customers' aesthetic perceptions, emotional states, and behavioral responses and can inform the composition of a luxury hotel's servicescape, which reflects customers' consumption motivation.     

Does educating customers create positive word of mouth?

This research theorizes and empirically examines whether and how educating customers—a brand's efforts to enhance customers' product-related knowledge—affects customer word of mouth (WOM). In two lab experiments across service and retailing contexts, we find that educating customers enhances customers' positive WOM for a brand. Customer satisfaction and perceived expertise mediate this effect. Critically, the positive impact on WOM is stronger for customers who have less prior knowledge regarding the educational topic and are more amenable to knowledge sharing. The current findings add to the literature on customer education and WOM and offer managerial insights for improving brands' WOM campaigns.     

An examination of the congruence and incongruence between employee actual and customer perceived emotional labor

This study examines the effects of the congruence and incongruence between employee actual and customer perceived emotional labor on customer trust. Based on data collected from 510 service employee and customer dyads in restaurants, the results of response surface modeling indicate that customer trust is higher when employee deep acting and customer perceived deep acting are both high rather than both low. Customer trust is also higher when customer perceived deep acting is higher than employee actual deep acting rather than vice versa. The effects are different in surface acting: as employee surface acting and customer perceived surface acting increase, customer trust initially decreases, then increases, exhibiting a U‐shaped effect. Implications for both theory and practice are discussed.     

The role of love in satisfied customers' relationships with retailers

This study proposes and tests a model that includes customer love as a measure of satisfied customers' emotional responses to retailers specifically in apparel and grocery store contexts. Customer love was found to partially mediate the effect of service quality on positive word-of-mouth and willingness to pay more. In contrast, customer love was proven to fully mediate the effect of service quality on self-disclosure and competitive insulation. As a control variable, emotional intensity had a positive effect on customer love. The implications of the customer love construct are discussed, as well as limitations and areas for future research.     

How does the learning climate affect customer satisfaction?

This study investigates the role of the learning climate in the effective management of salespersons' behaviour in service encounters. This paper reports the development and testing of a two-level model in which salespersons' perceptions of the learning climate are related to their adaptive selling behaviour and their adaptive selling behaviour is, in turn, related to customers' evaluation of the salespersons' knowledge of customers and customer satisfaction. A total of 417 service encounters involving 88 bank consultants were analysed using hierarchical linear modelling, with results that support most of the proposed model. More specifically, learning climate was positively related to adaptive selling behaviour, and adaptive selling behaviour was directly related to customer satisfaction. In addition, adaptive selling behaviour was associated with customer satisfaction through customers' perception of the salesperson's knowledge. Both theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

How managerial responses to online reviews affect customer satisfaction: An empirical study based on additional reviews

This study investigates the internality of managerial responses (MRs) to online reviews on the responded customers' (i.e., customers who have posted an initial review and then being responded by the company through an MR) satisfaction. By utilizing the data of additional reviews (ARs), an innovative social media module for customers to express follow-up opinions that complement their initial reviews, we examine the impact of MR treatment on the customers' AR valence. We leverage the insight that the observability of MR at the time of the responded customer posts an AR is a crucial condition to the impact of the MR, and thus regard the observability of MR as an exogenous treatment for model identification. Fixed effects models with extensive control variables are proposed to estimate the MR treatment effects. The results show that MRs have significant positive impacts on customers' satisfaction in ARs. Further explorations show that the positive impacts are mainly due to the positive effects of MRs on nonpositive initial reviews (MR-Ns), suggesting that MR-Ns are an effective management tool for customer complaints. Moreover, this study identifies MR delay as a boundary condition for the internality of MRs because MR delay negatively moderates the positive impacts of MRs. Therefore, companies should promptly respond to customers' negative opinions in their reviews. This study is among the very first to clearly identify the internality of MRs on the responded customers’ satisfaction. We show that the existing results on the externality of MRs are not directly applicable to the internality of MRs, highlighting the novelty of this study. The obtained new insights provide practical guidelines for companies to adjust their intervention strategies on e-commerce platforms.     

Is there any value in the online reviews of remedial satisfied customers? An empirical study in the hospitality industry

Hospitality service providers lack attention to the positive reviews written by remedial satisfied customers, although they have devoted a lot of energy to service recovery. Drawing on the accessibility-diagnosticity framework, this study investigates the relationship between the online review types of remedial satisfied customers and potential customers' booking intentions. The results indicate that outcome satisfactory review not only improves review impression and positively affects customers' booking intentions, but also reduces perceived risk and enhances customers’ booking intentions. The review valence consistency plays a moderating role in the dual-path effect of online review types on booking intentions.     

Social commerce website design,perceived value and loyalty behavior intentions: The moderating roles of gender,age and frequency of use

Drawing on the stimulus-organism-response (SOR) framework, a model is tested that improves the understanding of customer loyalty toward social commerce websites. The results showed that: information and service quality are key antecedents of perceived value, whereas rewards and recognition, and customization are non-significant. Perceived value is an important driver of customer loyalty toward these websites. The model's relationships are affected by gender and frequency of use. Overall, the findings of this study extend the understanding in the social commerce context of: (i) the antecedents of customer perceived value and behavioral intentions; and (ii) the moderating effects of age, gender and frequency of social commerce use on the model relationships.     

The influence of customer-to-customer interactions and role typology on customer reaction

The service encounter is an important topic in service management. Although researchers have argued that customer-to-customer interactions may affect customers' evaluation of the service experience in service encounter contexts, the impact of customer-to-customer interaction on customer reaction has not been sufficiently studied. Consequently, the objective of this research is to investigate the relationship between customer-to-customer interactions, role typology and customer reaction. This research adopted questionnaires to investigate tourists traveling to foreign areas and concluded that the perception of customer-to-customer interaction incidents could be extracted into six factors. ‘Protocol and sociability incidents’ have a significant positive impact on customer satisfaction; ‘malcontent incidents’ have a negative impact; ‘crude incidents’ and ‘malcontent incidents’ have significant negative impact on customer loyalty; and finally, the customer's role typology moderates the relationship between ‘protocol and sociability incidents’ and customer satisfaction.     

Engaging and retaining customers with AI and employee service

Artificial intelligence (AI) permeates in service organisations as a tool to enhance operational efficiency and improve customer experience. Reports show that most consumers prefer human interactions with service employees. Drawing on this observation, the current study examines how customers' service experiences with employees and AI influence customer engagement and loyalty. Customers’ emotional intelligence is proposed as a moderator between service experience and customer engagement. The study was conducted with hotel customers in Australia. The results show that whilst both service experience with employees and AI are significantly related to customer engagement and loyalty, only certain dimensions make significant unique variances in the outcome variables. The findings indicate that customers prefer employee service. These service experiences also have significant partial mediation effects on customer loyalty. Emotional intelligence has a significant moderation effect on customer engagement. Discussion of these findings and implications derived from this study concludes this paper.     

“Yes,we do. Why not use augmented reality?” customer responses to experiential presentations of AR-based applications

Augmented reality (AR) is regarded as a visually transformative technology that enables consumers to gain immersive and enjoyable information about experience products/services during the purchasing process. Based on the stimulus-organism-response (S–O-R) paradigm, this study investigates how experiential AR applications (apps) influence customers' experiential value, in turn enhancing continued usage intention. Furthermore, perceived customer support plays an even more important role in enhancing customers’ continued usage intention. This study obtained data through an online survey of 437 customers of the YouCam Makeup app in Taiwan. We used SmartPLS software to analyze the data and test the hypotheses. The findings suggest that the features of an experiential AR app have a greater positive impact on hedonic value than utilitarian value; in turn, only hedonic value has a positive impact on continued usage intention. The results further demonstrate that the effect of hedonic value on continued usage intention is positively moderated by perceived customer support.     

The new wave of AI-powered luxury brands online shopping experience: The role of digital multisensory cues and customers’ engagement

Academic literature retains a dearth of empirical evidence of the cutting-edge aspect of artificial intelligence (AI)-powered digital assistance and digital multisensory cues, despite the prospect of these factors on real-life customers' luxury brand online shopping experience. Thus, the aim of this study is to examine the significant pathway and effects of AI-powered digital assistance toward customers’ luxury brand online shopping experience. Drawing on S–O-R (Stimulus, organism, and response) and TRAM (Technology Readiness and Acceptance Model) paradigm, a multi-method research design was deployed to investigate constructs. Firstly, semi-structured interviews were utilized to explore customers' online behavior under the luxury brands and information technology aspect. Secondly, survey data were collected and analyzed by using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA). The PLS-based analysis of quantitative data confirmed the exploratory insights of qualitative findings, establishing the connections of AI-powered digital assistance, customer engagement, and customers' luxury brand online shopping experience. Research findings also suggest that customer engagement plays a mediation role in the relationship between AI-powered digital assistance and customers' luxury brand online shopping experience. Besides, digital multisensory cues moderate the relationship between AI-powered digital assistance and customer engagement. Further, fsQCA complements the findings of PLS-SEM that reveal the significant combination of factors that lead to the perceptions of customers' luxury brand online shopping experience.     

CSR attributions and the moderating effect of perceived CSR fit on consumer trust,identification, and loyalty

Although many companies have engaged in corporate social responsibility (CSR) actions to elicit positive customer responses, the motivation behind CSR actions plays an important role in how effective they are, often leading to unexpected outcomes. While previous literature has placed a strong emphasis on value- and strategy-driven CSR actions, the changing consumer perceptions of and responses to these CSR actions remain less understood. Therefore, the current study investigates 1) how a company's CSR attribution affects consumer trust, identification, and loyalty and 2) how the perceived CSR fit moderates these relationships. The results indicate that value-driven, strategic, and stakeholder-driven attributions have positive effects on consumer trust, influencing consumer-company identification and loyalty positively. Further, we find that perceived CSR fit significantly moderates the relationship between strategic attribution and trust and between trust and loyalty. This study provides meaningful implications for both academia and industry, as it illustrates the changes in consumer views following the global pandemic relative to consumer views revealed in earlier studies.     

Influence of salesperson characteristics and customer emotion on retail dyadic relationships

Retail salespeople often serve as a critical nexus between retailers and their customers. Salespeople can provide information and service that assist customers during the purchase process. Through buye–seller interaction, salespeople conceivably will influence how customers feel when shopping; in essence, salespersons are likely to have an impact on customers' emotions. Prior research has found that customer emotions have beneficial effects for both the store and the salesperson. Although previous work has considered the effect store environment has on customer emotions, no extant research has examined how customer emotions emerge after interacting with salespeople or what the outcomes of those emotions are. Consequently, this paper examines potential precursors of customers' emotions that arise during interaction with retail sales personnel, as well as consequences of those emotions. A conceptual framework is developed, propositions are posited, and retail management and research implications are presented.