Happiness as a predictor of service quality and commitment for utilitarian and hedonic services

In services research, little attention has been devoted to long‐term intrinsic personality traits. Long‐term personality traits predict short‐term affective states and thus understanding them is important from a service standpoint. Further, identifying long‐term personality traits facilitates the targeting of customers who are predisposed to evaluate services in a positive manner. This study focuses on one long‐term affective trait, happiness, and examines its impact on service evaluation and commitment, as it has been shown that the level of happiness affects whether people perceive life events, both great and small, in a positive or negative manner. Three studies were conducted to research the issue. The first study shows that customers who are happier evaluate service quality in utilitarian services in a more positive manner than do customers who are less happy. The second study shows that for hedonic services, involvement serves as an antecedent to perceived service quality; happier customers are also more involved in hedonic services, and thus perceive service quality in a more positive manner. Study 3 examines the link between happiness and commitment and shows that customers who are happier are also more prone to be committed to hedonic services. These results contribute to the marketing literature by showing that customers are predisposed to evaluate service quality in line with their level of happiness in the case of both utilitarian and hedonic services. Thus, marketing scholars and practitioners ought to recognize that service quality and commitment are partially predetermined by the personality of the customer and that some customers are more difficult to please than others. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Managing a Global Retail Brand in Different Markets: Meta-Analyses of Customer Responses to Service Encounters

This study investigates how retailers can leverage their brand to shape customers’ satisfaction with service encounters. It develops and tests hypotheses about how brand, store, and consumer factors moderate customer responses to experience clues during retail service encounters. Six meta-regression analyses synthesize and compare results from 842 satisfaction equations describing customers’ encounters with a global retailer operating 400 stores in 32 countries. The results show how customers weigh their perceptions of service encounters differently depending on brand, store, and consumer factors. In markets where customers believe the retailer has high holistic brand quality, they place less weight on experience clues within the store. In markets where customers believe the retailer’s service brand promise, they place more weight on in-store experience clues. In markets where the retailer promises utilitarian value, customers weigh functional experience clues more heavily. In markets with an online purchasing channel, the effect of experience clues common to offline and online store environments is magnified, and unique clues are diminished. In addition, customers heavily weigh experience clues that fit their goals. In general, retail success factors include high brand quality (which makes customers more forgiving), a service brand promise that is mirrored in the store image (which makes customers attend to the experience clues aligned with them), and the careful monitoring and managing of retail touchpoints (to customize experience clues to each market). In this way, retailers can use customer-based strategies to effectively design and manage their global retail brand in different markets.     

Does Raising Value Co-creation Increase All Customers’ Happiness?

Happiness, defined as a state of well-being and contentment, is a central human goal. Despite advances in customer behavior research related to value co-creation, the link between customer happiness and these behaviors remains unclear. This study therefore examines customers’ in-role participation behavior and extra-role citizenship behavior to determine their influence on customers’ happiness. Customer participation and citizenship behaviors relate positively to customers’ perceptions of both service performance and their contributions to others’ welfare. In addition, collectivism moderates the relationship between perceived contributions to others’ welfare and happiness; individualism instead moderates the relationship between perceived service performance and happiness. These findings provide both managerial implications and directions for business marketing ethics.     

Analysing the drivers of customer happiness at authorized workshops and improving retention

Due to increased business competition, customer happiness has drawn significant interest in recent times. With customer happiness at authorized workshops in mind, workshops are trying hard to give the best services to customers so that they feel happy and return even after free services. However, customers are not using regular maintenance services properly although their vehicles are still under warranty. Literature shows that there is a direct relationship between company performance and customer happiness. However, no literature is available related to sustaining customer happiness and improving retention after free services. Therefore, the study aims to identify the drivers of customer happiness at authorized automotive workshops and prioritize them, allowing service providers to improve services to help in improving customer retention even after free services. To achieve this aim, a two-phased research methodology was used. In the first phase, an extensive literature review was carried out to list drivers of customer happiness; and finalized the drivers empirically. Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) was employed in the second phase to prioritize the drivers. The ‘technological’ driver has been reported as the most important sustainable driver of customer happiness followed by ‘social’ driver. This study will help service providers to plan resources effectively and increase customer happiness at authorized workshops; this will improve retention even after free services. To check the robustness of results, sensitivity analysis is performed.     

Warmth during non-productive retail encounters: the hidden side of productivity

Productivity in retailing usually has been narrowly defined in short term economic performance. Although this is important, underlying salespersons' decisions are at work. As the core encounter of the entire value adding process from beginning to end, the interaction between salespeople and customers in the final step before consumption must be vital to understand the underlying human factors at work. We argue that this `soft' side (human factor) determines the `hard' productivity outcomes and that the dynamics of the service delivery process must be understood. Therefore, in this paper the point of sale has been studied second-by-second from the customer perspective to simulate how evaluations and perceptions vary during the encounter. By mapping the dynamic aspects we attempt to unravel the hidden side of how productivity is generated. The results obtained in two different `non-productive' retail encounters show that there is a substantial correlation between perceived warmth during the service encounter as a measure of perceived relationship and likeability, perceived service quality and loyalty.     

Task type's effect on attitudes towards voice assistants

There is an emerging interest in examining user attitudes towards voice assistants (VAs); however, there is limited research on how user attitudes are formulated in different contexts. Drawing from the stereotype content models, the current study attempts to investigate how users perceive and evaluate voice assistants (VAs) in different contexts (i.e., functional vs. social tasks) based on warmth, competence and trustworthiness. Study 1 (N = 123) employs a within-subjects design to examine how task type (functional vs. social) affects user perceptions and attitudes towards a VA (i.e., Google Assistant). Study 2 (N = 116) and Study 3 (N = 61) examine the boundary effect of perceived psychological power and ease of use. The findings show that attitude is significantly more positive in functional tasks (vs. social), and this effect is mediated by perceived competence. This indirect effect is also significantly moderated by perceived ease of use. Perceived warmth does not mediate the effect of social tasks on attitude, and trust in VAs is a direct outcome of functional tasks. Taken together, this study contributes to both theory and practice in many ways. Specifically, the findings are the first to demonstrate a direct effect of task type on consumer perceptions and attitudes. Additionally, the findings indicate that user evaluations of VAs are still dominated by user perceptions of the competence of the VAs.     

“Happy Together”: Effects of Brand Community Engagement on Customer Happiness

Because the pursuit of happiness is fundamental, humans perform a wide range of activities, including consumption, to lead a happy life. For marketers, findings from positive psychology suggest that customer happiness may arise through customer engagement. This article proposes a conceptual framework of customer happiness in brand communities and analyzes the effect of customer engagement on customer happiness, as well as on the ultimate outcomes of word of mouth and purchase intentions. Structural equation modeling provides a test of the model through an empirical study with 518 members from the online brand community for a German automotive brand. Customer engagement exerts a significant positive effect on customer happiness, which in turn increases positive word of mouth and purchase intentions. Therefore, marketing managers should invest in brand communities to engage customers and build and maintain their happiness and loyalty.     

Mitigating the effect of service encounters

Although marketers believe that encounters with service employees are a major determinant of customers' perceived service quality and value, there is little empirical evidence that quantifies this relationship. This paper considers the role of employee service encounters, such as repair visits and sales calls, within a comprehensive model of customers' assessments of service quality and value. It is estimated with survey data that describe small business customers' ratings of a local telephone company. In contrast with marketing folklore, most employee service encounters do not affect perceived service quality, but they have a strong effect on perceived service value. By quantifying the effect of sales calls, repair visits, billing contacts and so forth, we find that service encounters frequently do not compensate for service failures and disruptions.     

Perceived power imbalance and customer dissatisfaction

This study explores the causes of customer dissatisfaction in service interactions in which customers perceive a status of lower power than the service providers. Characterizing such service encounters as encounters between powerful service providers and subordinate customers, the study attempts to identify the service providers' specific actions that caused customers to experience memorable dissatisfaction. For contexts of the study, professional, judgemental, and governmental services are used. The customers' dissatisfying experiences with these services were studied by using the critical incident technique to uncover and classify the causes of dissatisfaction as well as their post-encounter behaviours. During the data analysis, 10 causes of dissatisfaction emerged. In addition, customers' reactions to their dissatisfaction were noted and classified. Implications for practitioners and academicians are provided.     

Investigating the dynamics of service attributes in multi-channel environments

Previous research has shown that customer evaluations of attributes in existing product and service categories are dynamic. In this study, we use a response surface model based on a conjoint analysis of service profiles in the context of mobile phone service to examine the dynamics of multi-channel service attributes and their influence on customers’ intention to renew a service agreement. Our results provide insights for the design of a service that may not be what customers have experienced in the past and demonstrate the qualities of a set of multi-channel service attributes that have not been included in previous studies.     

Customer happiness as a function of perceived loyalty program benefits - A quantile regression approach

Customers consider pursuit of happiness to be fundamental to their purchase experiences; thus, companies are increasingly looking for opportunities to bring happiness to customers especially in their consumption activity. The current study undertakes analysis of effect of perceived benefits of loyalty programs and customer satisfaction on customer happiness/purchase enjoyment if he/she has loyalty program membership. Empirical study with 407 participants found that Discovery and Entertainment Benefit (DEB) and Satisfaction Derived (SD) have an effect on customer happiness/purchase enjoyment while being a loyalty program member. Quantile regression analysis was used to analyze if independent variables have a differential effect on different levels of the dependent variable i.e. customer happiness/purchase enjoyment from use of loyalty programs. Since DEB and SD were found to be positively significant in influencing customer happiness/purchase enjoyment, companies should focus on balancing these aspects of customers’ consumption experience.     

The depicted service employee in marketing communications: An empirical assessment of the impact of facial happiness

Employees are often depicted in service firms’ marketing communications material. This study examines one particular aspect of such depictions: the signaling of happiness in terms of the employees’ facial expressions. It is assumed that depicted faces transmit emotional signals, that receivers are hardwired to react to such signals, and that the emotional signals influence the outcomes of the receivers’ information processing activities. Our empirical results show that this was indeed the case: employee display of happiness was positively and significantly associated with employee evaluations. The contribution of employee happiness remained significant when other characteristics of the depicted face (e.g., attractiveness) were controlled for. Our results also show that employee evaluations had a positive impact on the overall evaluation of the offer of the employee's firm, and that the employee evaluations mediated the association between employee display of happiness and the evaluation of the offer.     

Employee display of burnout in the service encounter and its impact on customer satisfaction

This study examines if employee display of burnout symptoms in service encounters has an impact on customer satisfaction. An experimental approach was used in which the employee's display of burnout (absent vs. present) and the service performance level (low vs. high) were the manipulated factors. The results show that employee display of burnout had a negative impact on customer satisfaction, that this effect was mediated by customers’ appraisals of the employee's emotional state, and that the effect was stronger under the condition of low service performance.     

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.     

Speaking up against service unfairness: The role of negative meta-perceptions

Taking into account customers’ rapport with a service staff and levels of service unfairness, this paper aims to examine the role of negative meta-perceptions in predicting customers’ intention to directly speak up to the service staff following an unfair service treatment. The results show that negative meta-perceptions mediate the indirect effect of levels of rapport and service unfairness on speaking up directly to the service staff. The study offers a new explanation on why customers are hesitant to confront the service staff directly owing to negative meta-perceptions that they develop during service encounters.     

The Impact of “Encouragement” in the Development of Professionals for the Non-Profit Service Sector

Abstract

This study examines the role of perceived intent in the context of penalty evaluation. Based on prior attribution research, the study proposes that customers' responses to penalties are different depending on their perceptions of the organization's intent of using penalties. Using the data collected across the service industry, the study shows that when customers perceive the organization's intent as defensive rather than offensive, their evaluations of the penalty and the organization (e.g., perceived justice, satisfaction, behavioral intentions) are more positive than when they do not. Managerial implications are offered.     

Comparing perceived insecurity among customers and retail staff during service encounters

The study compares perceived insecurity by customers and retail staff during service encounters. The topic is important, because retailers invest millions of dollars in security. The framework of the study divides perceived insecurity into financial, physical, psychosocial and time-related insecurity. A total of 39 consumers participated in seven focus group discussions, and 34 retail staff members responded semi-structured interviews. The study confirms that from both customer and staff perspectives a high quality service encounter has an influence on perceived insecurity, and it diminishes disturbance and criminal activity. However, there are differences between customer and staff perspectives in many areas.     

Aesthetic labor and visible diversity: The role in retailing service encounters

This study endeavors to investigate the role of the appearance of customer service staff in forming customer perceptions. It also aims to fill the gap in existing knowledge by exploring the notion of visible diversity, for example, ethnicity, age, gender and perceived sexual orientation of store staff in service encounter from the customers’ perspective. The study adopted a qualitative, inductive approach in data collection using a sample of 30 customers from leading Australian fashion retailers. This study identifies three themes explaining customer perceptions of staff's aesthetic labor, namely mirroring appearance, matching appearance, and charming appearance, which can be explained by the social identity theory, role theory and aesthetic capital. It is found that staff appearance might affect customers’ intention to revisit but does not guarantee sales. In addition, based on signaling theory, the results show that age, ethnicity, gender and perceived sexual orientation of the retail store staff are meaningful factors in determining customers’ attitudes and behavior. This study is one of the first that takes aspects of visible diversity into account along with aesthetic labor and customer experience in a retail setting.