Abstract
Traditionally, service encounters in firms have been conducted through interactions between customers and employees. In this digital age, however, different industries have begun to adopt Self-Service Technologies (SSTs) in which customers are serviced by a machine rather than a human employee. This study hypothesized that customer delight, customer retention intent, and Word-of-Mouth (WOM) intent can all be driven by both SST use and surprise. The purpose of this study was thus to examine the role of SSTs and surprise on the three aforementioned dependent variables in an Indonesian supermarket setting. 189 respondents were selected as the convenience sample to represent the Indonesian population, and a between-subjects experiment was conducted. The results revealed that neither service encounter method nor surprise had a significant impact on the three dependent variables. Surprise may not necessarily induce delight, perhaps due to a lack of a solid explanation that followed it and differences in cultural perceptions of surprise. Moreover, it was predicted that rather than the SST use itself, customer responses are influenced by the awareness of other Indonesians towards SSTs.
Highlights
Most customers can agree that their main contact with a firm can be traced back to their encounters with frontline employees (Bitner, Brown, & Meuter, 2000) It is through these encounters that customers can acquire information about various concerns
Before any tests can be conducted, the data was cleaned and organized by removing cases with incorrect answers for both quality control questions from the dataset. It was organized further by combining the answers for each questionnaire item into lists labelled with the item name, followed by finding the Cronbach’s alpha values for each construct
The prepared data can be analyzed using two statistical tests, two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and two-way analysis of covariance (ANCOVA). The former test was chosen to observe whether an interaction exists between the independent variables and each dependent variable, while the latter test can determine whether this interaction still exists after adjusting for one or more control variables (Statistics Laerd, n.d.)
Summary
Most customers can agree that their main contact with a firm can be traced back to their encounters with frontline employees (Bitner, Brown, & Meuter, 2000) It is through these encounters that customers can acquire information about various concerns. Millions of service encounters occur daily around the world, in all kinds of industries (Bitner et al, 2000). One can venture into their local grocery store and ask a store clerk where to locate a certain item, or to a Starbucks, engaging in a service encounter as they order their morning coffee. It can be presumed, that customers expressing their satisfaction or disappointment with a frontline employee is as common (Cambra-Fierro, Melero-Polo, & Vázquez-Carrasco, 2014). It comes as no surprise that firms pride themselves on the performance of their customer service employees
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