Service encounter conceptualisation:employees' service behaviours and customers' service quality perceptions

The enhancement of service quality is an area of optimal managerial relevance that has, to date, received minimal attention in the literature. Because customers' service quality evaluations are based almost entirely upon the behaviours of frontline employees, organisations rely heavily upon these employees to improve overall service quality provision. However, much of the literature looking at service quality enhancement lacks detail when examining the impact of employee service-related behaviours on customers' service quality perceptions. As a result, this paper comprehensively conceptualises those front-line employee behaviours which are the most likely to enhance customers' service quality perceptions. This conceptualisation is grounded in an extensive review of the services marketing literature, pooling together previously disparate research strands. Formal hypotheses are presented. Implications and future research directions are also discussed.

Evaluating service quality and customer satisfaction evaluation in an emerging markets

Developing economies offer tremendous potential for future growth and organizations appreciating these consumers’ requirements stand to reap considerable returns. However, compared with more developed economies published consumer studies are few. In particular, there is a dearth of service quality research and hardly any from Africa. Furthermore, the little available research tends to apply Western methodologies, which may not be entirely appropriate. This research investigates East African consumer perceptions of retail banking using an approach that takes account of the research context. Qualitative research was undertaken to define the relevant service attributes. Performance along these was then investigated through a survey with over 2000 respondents. Principal component analysis identifies 13 core service dimensions and multinomial logistic regression reveals which are the key drivers of customer satisfaction. Comparison of the results with studies from other regions confirms that established standardized research instruments are likely to miss or under-represent service attributes important in developing countries.

Internal service quality and its impact on external service quality:a study of the role of internal customer types and the dimensions which are used to assess internal suppliers within an organisation and how this affects external service quality

This research explores the role of internal customers in the delivery of external service quality. It will consider any potentially different internal customer types that may exist within the organisation. Additionally, it will explore any potential differences in the dimensions that are used to measure service quality internally and externally. If there are different internal customer types then there may be different dimensions which are used to measure service quality between these types and this will be considered also. The approach adopted given the depth and breadth of understanding required, was an action research case based approach. The research objectives were:(i) To determine the dimensions of internal service quality between internal customer supplier cells. (ii) To determine what variation, if any, there is in the dimension sets between internal customer supplier cells. (iii) To determine any ranking in the dimensions that could exist by internal customer supplier cell type. (iv) To investigate the impact of internal service quality on external service quality over time. The research findings were: (i) The majority of the dimensions used in measuring external service quality were also used internally. There were additions of new dimensions however and some dimensions which were used externally, for internal use, had to be redefined. (ii) Variation in dimension sets were revealed during the research. Four different dimension sets were identified and these were matched with four different types of internal service interaction. (iii) Differences in the ranking of dimensions within each dimension set for each internal customer supplier cell type were confirmed. (iv) Internal service quality was seen to influence external service quality but at a cellular level rather than company level. At the company level, the average internal service quality at the start and finish of the research showed no improvement but external service quality had improved. Further investigation at the cellular level showed that improvements in internal service quality had occurred. Those improvements were found to be with the cells that were closest to the customer.The research implications were found to be: (i) some cells may not be necessary in the delivery of external service quality. (ii) The immediacy of the cell to the external customer and number of interactions into and out of that cell has the greatest effect on external customer satisfaction. (iii) Internal service quality may be driven by the customer affecting those cells at the front end of the business first. This then cascades back to those cells which are less immediate until ultimately the whole organisation shows improvements in internal service quality.

An investigation into the nature, determinants, and dynamics of service quality expectations

On the basis of a review of the substantive quality and service marketing literature current knowledge regarding service quality expectations was found either absent or deficient. The phenomenon is of increasing importance to both marketing researchers and management and was therefore judged worthy of scholarly consideration. Because the service quality literature was insufficiently rich when embarking on the thesis three basic research issues were considered namely the nature, determinants, and dynamics of service quality expectations. These issues were first conceptually and then qualitatively explored. This process generated research hypotheses mainly relating to a model which were subsequently tested through a series of empirical investigations using questionnaire data from field studies in a single context. The results were internally consistent and strongly supported the main research hypotheses. It was found that service quality expectations can be meaningfully described in terms of generic/service-specific, intangible/tangible, and process/outcome categories. Service-specific quality expectations were also shown to be determined by generic service quality expectations, demographic variables, personal values, psychological needs, general service sophistication, service-specific sophistication, purchase motives, and service-specific information when treating service class involvement as an exogenous variable. Subjects who had previously not directly experienced a particular service were additionally found to revise their expectations of quality when exposed to the service with change being driven by a sub-set of identified determinants.

Does internal marketing improve service quality in call centres?

Although internal marketing has been conceptually argued to improve service quality, empirical evidence in this respect has been limited. This research investigates the relationship between rewards, which are a key component of internal marketing paradigm, and service quality of frontline employees in banking call centres. In this context, the authors develop hypotheses with the help of literature review, and empirically examine the effects of various extrinsic and intrinsic rewards on service quality. The results indicate that intrinsic rewards have greater effect on service quality than extrinsic rewards, which offer managerial implications and directions for future research.

Service quality of frontline employees:a profile deviation analysis

Using a configuration theory approach, this paper conducts a comparative study between frontline employees in phone and face-to-face service encounters for a retail bank. The study compares the top performers in service quality in relation to three components of organizational commitment and their demographics by applying a profile deviation analysis. The results show that the profile deviation for face-to-face employees is significantly negative, while for call center employees nonsignificant. Although the study finds no significant differences in the three components of commitment, significant differences exist in the total experience and age of the best performers. Also, affective commitment dominates the profile of high performers, while poor service providers seem to exhibit a higher level of continuance commitment. This study demonstrates the utility of profile deviation approaches in designing internal marketing strategies.

Internet banking service quality:an investigation of interrelationships between construct dimensions

Service quality measurement in Internet banking services is an area of growing interest to researchers and managers. This research investigates the interrelationships between the dimensions comprising the Internet banking service quality construct through structural equation modelling. Five Internet service quality dimensions are identified: access, web interface, trust, attention and credibility. Credibility is modelled as an outcome of the causal variables of access, web interface, trust and attention. Trust and attention emerges as key dimensions in explaining the credibility dimension. Access is found to be a common antecedent of trust, attention and Web interface dimensions. Implications from the findings are offered.

The relative influence of organisational commitment and job-satisfaction on service quality of customer-contact employees in banking call centres

An inter-disciplinary approach is adopted to provide a deeper understanding of the human resource-service quality relationship. The paper tests the relationships organisational commitment and job satisfaction have with service quality of customer-contact employees. Hypotheses are constructed by reviewing literature in the areas of human resource management and services marketing. A study comprising 342 employees was conducted in four telephone call centres of a major UK retail bank. Investigates how different forms of organisational commitment and job satisfaction influence the service quality delivered by contact employees. Findings indicate that job satisfaction and organisational commitment of employees have a significant impact on service quality delivered. The affective component of commitment was found to be more important than job satisfaction in determining service quality of customer-contact employees.

Developing and leveraging human capital resource to promote service quality:testing a theory of performance

Grounded in Vroom’s motivational framework of performance, we examine the interactive influence of collective human capital (ability) and aggregated service orientation (motivation) on the cross-level relationship between high-performance work systems (HPWS) and individual-level service quality. Results of hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) revealed that HPWS related to collective human capital and aggregated service orientation, which in turn related to individual-level service quality. Furthermore, both HLM and ordinary least squares regression analyses revealed a cross-level interaction effect of collective human capital and aggregated service orientation such that high levels of collective human capital and aggregated service orientation influence individual-level service quality.

Exploring the effect of buffer behaviour on perceived video quality

In this work we deal with video streams over TCP networks and propose an alternative measurement to the widely used and accepted peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) due to the limitations of this metric in the presence of temporal errors. A test-bed was created to simulate buffer under-run in scalable video streams and the pauses produced as a result of the buffer under-run were inserted into the video before being employed as the subject of subjective testing. The pause intensity metric proposed in [1] was compared with the subjective results and it was shown that in spite of reductions in frame rate and resolution, a correlation with pause intensity still exists. Due to these conclusions, the metric may be employed in layer selection in scalable video streams. © 2011 IEEE.