Rewarding customer service? Using reward and recognition to deliver your customer service strategy

This report examines the role of reward and recognition in helping organisations deliver excellent customer service. It identifies the impact that reward and recognition practice has upon customer service and highlights which practices are more effective; shows the extent to which employees are satisfied with the rewards and recognition they receive; indicates those approaches to reward and recognition most associated with staff commitment; and looks at how other factors affect employee satisfaction with reward and recognition.

The impact of service characteristics on the switching costs-customer loyalty link

This research investigates the interrelationship between service characteristics and switching costs and makes two contributions to the service retailing literature: (1) As a means of better understanding the effectiveness of switching costs, the study suggests a two-dimensional typology of switching costs, including internal and external switching costs and (2) it reveals that the effect of these switching costs on customer loyalty is contingent upon four service characteristics (the IHIP characteristics of service). We carried out a meta-analytic review of the literature on the switching costs-customer loyalty link and created a hierarchical linear model using a sample of 1,694 customers from 51 service industries. Results reveal that external switching costs have a stronger average effect on customer loyalty than do internal switching costs. Moreover, we find that IHIP characteristics moderate the links between switching costs and customer loyalty. Thus, the link between external switching costs and customer loyalty is weaker in industries higher in the four service characteristics (as compared to industries lower in these characteristics), while the opposite moderating effect of service characteristics for the internal switching costs-loyalty link is noted. © 2014 New York University.

Development of ``HealthServe'': A measure of customer service orientation in healthcare

An assessment tool designed to measure a customer service orientation among RN's and LPN's was developed using a content-oriented approach. Critical incidents were first developed by asking two samples of healthcare managers (n = 52 and 25) to identify various customer-contact situations. The critical incidents were then used to formulate a 121-item instrument. Patient-contact workers from 3 hospitals (n = 102) completed the instrument along with the NEO-FFI, a measure of the Big Five personality factors. Concurrently, managers completed a performance evaluation scale on the employees participating in the study in order to determine the predictive validity of the instrument.^ Through a criterion-keying approach, the instrument was scaled down to 38 items. The correlation between HealthServe and the supervisory ratings of performance evaluation data supported the instrument's criterion-related validity (r =.66, p $<$.0001). Incremental validity of HealthServe over the Big Five was found with HealthServe accounting for 46% of the variance.^ The NEO-FFI was used to assess the correlation between personality traits and HealthServe. A factor analysis of HealthServe suggested 4 factors which were correlated with the NEO-FFI scores. Results indicated that HealthServe was related to Extraversion, Openness to Experience, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness and negatively related to Neuroticism.^ The benefits of the test construction procedure used here over the use of broad-based measures of personality were discussed as well as the limitations of using a concurrent validation strategy. Recommendations for future studies were provided. ^

Model of Service Quality: Customer Loyalty for Hotels

The authors investigate the relationship between loyalty and perceived service quality of hotel customers and discus managerial implications to develop strategies to enhance loyalty of hotel customers. A survey was conducted among customers in the San Francisco Bay Area. Results indicate that customer loyalty is dependent on perceived service quality which is observed in terms of timelines, facilities, and ambience.

Manager-Customer Relationship in Food Service Commissary Operations

Documented reports of day-to-day decision-making in food service tend to emphasize technical aspects. However, this view does not represent completely the decision-making process managers go through. The author reports on the effect of the manager-customer relationship in decision-making by managers.

Service Quality and Black Customer Satisfaction - A Perspective on the United States Restaurant Industry

This paper examines the issue of racial discrimination of Black United States (U.S.) restaurant patrons from a service quality and customer satisfaction perspective. In spite of the progress the industry has made in recent years to alleviate this problem, many contemporary examples clearly demonstrate that racial discrimination is still of great concern. The articles stresses the importance of an ethical approach in human resource management-intensive and offers suggestions for reducing discriminatory practices in U.S. restaurant service delivery.

Customer Perception of Drive-Thru Service

The rapid growth of off-premise dining and, consequently, drive- thru service, presents the challenge of building customer loyalty in a highly competitive marketplace. In this study, customer perceptions of drive-thru service associated with quick service restaurants were examined. Results suggest that service time appears to differ among quick service restaurants, even those within the same chain. Employee courtesy was rated positively at all restaurants, as was food quality. The implications of these results for restaurateurs who offer drive-thru service are discussed.

A Customer's Expectation and Perception of Hotel Service Quality in Cyprus

In recent years, hotels in Cyprus have encountered difficult economic times due to increasing customer demands and strong internal industry development competition. The hospitality industry’s main concern globally is to serve its customer S needs and desires, most of which are addressed through personal services. Hence, the hotel businesses that are able to provide quality services to its ever-demanding customers in a warm and efficient manner are those businesses which will be more likely to obtain a long term competitive advantage over their rivals. Ironically, the quality of services frequently cannot fully appreciated until something goes wrong, and then, the poor quality of services can have long lasting lingering effects on the customer base and, hence, often is translated into a loss of business. Nevertheless, since the issue of delivery of hospitality services always involves people, this issue must center around the management of the human resource factor, and in particular, on the way which interacts with itself and with guests, as service encounters. In the eyes of guests, hospitality businesses will be viewed successful or failure, depending on [he cumulative impact of the service encounters they have experienced on a personal level. Finally, since hotels are offering intangible and perishable personal service encounters, managing these services must be a paramount concern of any hotel business. As a preliminary exercise, visualize when you have last visited a hotel, or a restaurant, and then, ask yourself these questions: What did you feel about the quality of the experience? Was it a memorable one, which you would recommend it to others, or there were certain things, which could have made the difference? Thus, the way personalized services are provided can make the deference in attracting arid retaining long-term customers

Frontline employees’ innovative service behavior as key to customer loyalty:insights into FLEs’ resource gain spiral

Many service firms require frontline service employees (FLEs) to follow routines and standardized operating procedures during the service encounter, to deliver consistently high service standards. However, to create superior, pleasurable experiences for customers, featuring both helpful services and novel approaches to meeting their needs, firms in various sectors also have begun to encourage FLEs to engage in more innovative service behaviors. This study therefore investigates a new and complementary route to customer loyalty, beyond the conventional service-profit chain, that moves through FLEs' innovative service behavior. Drawing on conservation of resources (COR) theory, this study introduces a resource gain spiral at the service encounter, which runs from FLEs' emotional job engagement to innovative service behavior, and then leads to customer delight and finally customer loyalty. In accordance with COR theory, the proposed model also includes factors that might hinder (customer aggression, underemployment) or foster (colleague support, supervisor support) FLEs' resource gain spiral. A multilevel analysis of a large-scale, dyadic data set that contains responses from both FLEs and customers in multiple industries strongly supports the proposed resource gain spiral as a complementary route to customer loyalty. The positive emotional job engagement-innovative service behavior relationship is undermined by customer aggression and underemployment, as hypothesized. Surprisingly though, and contrary to the hypotheses, colleague and supervisor support do not seem to foster FLEs' resource gain spiral. Instead, colleague support weakens the engagement-innovative service behavior relationship, and supervisor support does not affect it. These results indicate that if FLEs can solicit resources from other sources, they may not need to invest as many of their individual resources. In particular, colleague support even appears to serve as a substitute for FLEs' individual resource investments in the resource gain spiral.

Analisi di un Sistema di Stoccaggio. L’attività di Customer Service. Il caso Due Torri S.p.A.

Si è analizzato un sistema di stoccaggio rivolgendo l'attenzione all'attività del Customer Service. Dopo il primo periodo di raccolta dati è stato popolato un database che rappresentasse al meglio la realtà osservata. Il database ci ha permesso, attraverso la manipolazione dei dati, di calcolare delle statistiche circa gli eventi più significativi in termini di tempo.

Customer involvement in new service development

This case study aims at filling the research gap in the literature, by researching how customers experience customer involvement in new service development, in addition to giving insight on what are the organisational customers’ motivations to become involved in service development. These subjects are studied by conducting three interviews. The thesis gives a review of previous findings regarding customer-driven new service development, customer involvement, customer roles, modes of involvement, communication in the involvement process, what is the role of customer engagement and what are the motivational drivers for customers. The thesis also explains what new service development is and makes a distinction between new service development and new service design. The results revealed that organisational customers want to be involved throughout the development process, with active involvement in the beginning and end phases. Moreover, customers prefer face-to-face methods and active and bidirectional communication throughout the process. The findings propose seven motivational factors, a new framework for customer-driven new service development and communication process map. The managerial implications list five themes for service providers to take into consideration when involving customers to the service development process.

UNDERSTANDING CUSTOMER CHOICES IN SERVICE OUTSOURCING AND REVENUE MANAGEMENT

This dissertation investigates customer behavior modeling in service outsourcing and revenue management in the service sector (i.e., airline and hotel industries). In particular, it focuses on a common theme of improving firms’ strategic decisions through the understanding of customer preferences. Decisions concerning degrees of outsourcing, such as firms’ capacity choices, are important to performance outcomes. These choices are especially important in high-customer-contact services (e.g., airline industry) because of the characteristics of services: simultaneity of consumption and production, and intangibility and perishability of the offering. Essay 1 estimates how outsourcing affects customer choices and market share in the airline industry, and consequently the revenue implications from outsourcing. However, outsourcing decisions are typically endogenous. A firm may choose whether to outsource or not based on what a firm expects to be the best outcome. Essay 2 contributes to the literature by proposing a structural model which could capture a firm’s profit-maximizing decision-making behavior in a market. This makes possible the prediction of consequences (i.e., performance outcomes) of future strategic moves. Another emerging area in service operations management is revenue management. Choice-based revenue systems incorporate discrete choice models into traditional revenue management algorithms. To successfully implement a choice-based revenue system, it is necessary to estimate customer preferences as a valid input to optimization algorithms. The third essay investigates how to estimate customer preferences when part of the market is consistently unobserved. This issue is especially prominent in choice-based revenue management systems. Normally a firm only has its own observed purchases, while those customers who purchase from competitors or do not make purchases are unobserved. Most current estimation procedures depend on unrealistic assumptions about customer arriving. This study proposes a new estimation methodology, which does not require any prior knowledge about the customer arrival process and allows for arbitrary demand distributions. Compared with previous methods, this model performs superior when the true demand is highly variable.

Communication across cultures? An intercultural approach to customer service in the hotel industry: a study with globally branded hotels in the United Kingdom

In a professional and business-social context such as that of global hotel brands in the United Kingdom, intercultural communication, contacts and relationships are found at the heart of daily operations and of customer service. A large part of the clientele base of hotels in the United Kingdom is formed by individuals who belong to different cultural groups that travel in the country either for leisure or business. At the same time, the global workforce which is recruited in the hotel industry in the United Kingdom is a reality here to stay. Global travelling and labor work mobility are phenomena which have been generated by changes which occur on a socio-economic, cultural and political level due to the phenomenon of globalization. The hotel industry is therefore well acquainted with the essence of different cultures either to be accommodated within hotel premises, as in the case of external customers, or of diversity management where different cultures are recruited in the hotel industry, as in the case of internal customers. This thesis derives from research conducted on eight different global hotel brands in the United Kingdom in particular, with reference to three, four and five star categories. The research aimed to answer the question of how hotels are organized in order to address issues of intercultural communication during customer service and if intercultural barriers arise during the intercultural interaction of hotel staff and global customers. So as to understand how global hotel brands operate the research carried out focused in three main areas relating to each hotel: organizational culture, customer service–customer care and intercultural issues. The study utilized qualitative interviews with hotel management staff and non-management staff from different cultural backgrounds, public space observations between customers and staff during check-in and checkout in the reception area and during dining at the café-bar and restaurant. Thematic analysis was also applied to the official web page of each hotel and to job advertisements to enhance the findings from the interviews and the observations. For the process of analysis of the data interpretive (hermeneutic) phenomenology of Martin Heidegger has been applied. Generally, it was found that hotel staff quite often feel perplexed by how to deal with and how to overcome, for instance, language barriers and religious issues and how to interpret non verbal behaviors or matters on food culture relating to the intercultural aspect of customer service. In addition, it was interesting to find that attention to excellent customer service on the part of hotel staff is a top organizational value and customer care is a priority. Despite that, the participating hotel brands appear to have not yet, realized how intercultural barriers can affect the daily operation of the hotel, the job performance and the psychology of hotel staff. Employees indicated that they were keen to receive diversity training, provided by their organizations, so as to learn about different cultural needs and expand their intercultural skills. The notion of diversity training in global hotel brands is based on the sense that one of the multiple aims of diversity management as a practice and policy in the workplace of hotels is the better understanding of intercultural differences. Therefore global hotel brands can consider diversity training as a practice which will benefit their hotel staff and clientele base at the same time. This can have a distinctive organizational advantage for organizational affairs in the hotel industry, with potential to influence the effectiveness and performance of hotels.

Customer Loyalty toward grocery retailing service: a multidimensional approach to costumer perceived value

Structured abstract Purpose: To deepen, in grocery retail context, the roles of consumer perceived value and consumer satisfaction, as antecedents’ dimensions of customer loyalty intentions. Design/Methodology/approach: Also employing a short version (12-items) of the original 19-item PERVAL scale of Sweeney & Soutar (2001), a structural equation modeling approach was applied to investigate statistical properties of the indirect influence on loyalty of a reflective second order customer perceived value model. The performance of three alternative estimation methods was compared through bootstrapping techniques. Findings: Results provided i) support for the use of the short form of the PERVAL scale in measuring consumer perceived value; ii) the influence of the four highly correlated independent latent predictors on satisfaction was well summarized by a higher-order reflective specification of consumer perceived value; iii) emotional and functional dimensions were determinants for the relationship with the retailer; iv) parameter’s bias with the three methods of estimation was only significant for bootstrap small sample sizes. Research limitations:/implications: Future research is needed to explore the use of the short form of the PERVAL scale in more homogeneous groups of consumers. Originality/value: Firstly, to indirectly explain customer loyalty mediated by customer satisfaction it was adopted a recent short form of PERVAL scale and a second order reflective conceptualization of value. Secondly, three alternative estimation methods were used and compared through bootstrapping and simulation procedures.