The Impact of Variability of Front-Line Service Employees on the Customer Perceptions of Service Quality

Abstract

Service quality is one of the most important and widely discussed issue in the services marketing field and literature, since according to many scholars service quality leads to customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, behavioral intentions, which in turn leads to revenue growth and profitability for the firms. Even though there are many studies conducted about perceived service quality, those studies are relied mostly upon transaction-based economic exchange logic but do not take new dominant logic into account in which services are considered as a new dominant logic of marketing focuses more on intangible sources and long-term relationships between service providers and customers (Vargo and Lusch 2004). In this new service dominant logic, customers and service providers are more interacted, involved and immersed in the process with their skills and knowledge. Thus, the relationship between customers and service employees, especially front-line service employees, are getting stronger and longer, which in turn increases the importance of service encounter. According to Bitner et al. (1990), service encounter is the period of time when the customer interacts directly with the firm/ service, yet customers mostly interact directly with front-line employees who explain and define the service to customers (Surprenant and Solomon 1987) and customers build a relationship with them (Hartline and Ferrell 1996). Besides, services are inherently dyadic relationships between a front-line employee and a customer (Dolen et al. 2002). Therefore, service encounters and front-line employees play an important role in influencing customer perceptions of service quality because the relationship between customers and organizations is mostly shaped by front-line service employee whom customers always interact with in service encounters. When compared to goods, services are characterized by intangibility, perishability, inseperability and variability. Variability refers to the changes and lack of consistency in service performance from one service encounter to another. The human factor is the primary factor in variability, hence Zeithaml et al. (1985) view it as a primary problem in labor intensive services. The key elements of variability in the human factor as it relates to services are: lack of consistency in behaviors in different service encounters (Paul and Hennig-Thurau 2007) and employee turnover (Frei et al. 1997). In exploring the variability of the front-line employees, using these two key factors of variability in the human factor is a crucial way of investigating the perceived service quality of customers.