Learning Service Experience from the Service Encounter of a Retailing Chain Storefront

Abstract

In this explorative research, we seek to find the most important service experience variables determining the customer purchase decision and the clerks' influence on customers' purchase. This study conducted a case study of a children's apparel company, denoted L, which has 243 retailing stores. Company L has implemented Point of Sale (POS) systems in its retailing stores, and the management wanted to know what functions can be added in facilitating storefront employees achieve better customer service experience. We, therefore, focus on observing the services provided by storefront employees and their reflection on customer's purchasing decision in a retailing store. The study generated decision trees via WEKA to analyze multiple data sources in order to (1) understand what makes good service experience in service encounter, (2) get explicit knowledge from service encounter information, and (3) learn about customers for clerks to internalize tacit knowledge. The findings can be used to add into company L's POS system in order to guide storefront employees to learn from trained decision rules. Moreover, the company can internalize service experience knowledge by aggregating learned rules from all retailing stores of the company.