Customer Encounters Research Articles

Effects of service encounter quality on courier and customer encounter satisfaction and loyalty in crowdsourcing logistics: an actor-partner interdependence model

ABSTRACT The quality of delivery service encounters in which crowdsourced couriers and customers highly interact and mutually influence each other affects their attitudes and behaviours. Crowdsourced couriers and customers are bilateral users of crowdsourced logistics platforms whose loyalty determines the sustainability of platforms in a competitive environment. Due to the interdependence of couriers and customers in service encounters, this study utilizes the novel actor-partner interdependence model to investigate the impact of service encounter quality on courier and customer responses drawing upon emotion contagion theory. Dyadic analysis demonstrates that courier and customer perceptions of service encounter quality are positively related to their encounter satisfaction, with subsequent effects on loyalty (actor effects), and encounter satisfaction mediates the relationship between their perceptions of service encounter quality and loyalty. Notably, we show that customer encounter satisfaction is not only influenced by their own perception of service encounter quality but also by the corresponding courier’s emotional contagion through interaction (partner effects). This study provides valuable insights for practitioners of crowdsourcing logistics platforms to improve the quality of future service encounters.

Learning efficient in-store picking strategies to reduce customer encounters in omnichannel retail

Omnichannel retailers are reinventing stores to meet the growing demand of the online channel. Several retailers now use stores as supporting distribution centers to offer quicker Buy-Online-Pickup-In-Store (BOPS) and Ship-From-Store (SFS) services. They resort to in-store picking to serve online orders using existing assets. However, in-store picking operations require picker carts traveling through store aisles, competing for store space, and possibly harming the offline customer experience. To learn picking policies that acknowledge interactions between pickers and offline customers, we formalize a new problem called Dynamic In-store Picker Routing Problem (diPRP). This problem considers a picker that tries to pick online orders (seeking) while minimizing customer encounters (hiding) – preserving the offline customer experience. We model the problem as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and solve it using a hybrid solution approach comprising mathematical programming and reinforcement learning components. Computational experiments on synthetic instances suggest that the algorithm converges to efficient policies. We apply our solution approach in the context of a large European retailer to assess the proposed policies regarding the number of orders picked and customers encountered. The learned policies are also tested in six different retail settings, demonstrating the flexibility of the proposed approach. Our work suggests that retailers should be able to scale the in-store picking of online orders without jeopardizing the experience of offline customers. The policies learned using the proposed solution approach reduced the number of customer encounters by up to 50%, compared to policies solely focused on picking orders. Thus, to pursue omnichannel strategies that adequately trade-off operational efficiency and customer experience, retailers cannot rely on actual simplistic picking strategies, such as choosing the shortest possible route.

Emotional elements as part of the digital tourism experience

Digital tools and platforms are often considered to improve customer experiences. Especially during the pandemic, businesses engaged with digital tools, e.g., marketing, sales, communication and experience creation. However, using digital solutions is often considered to solve all the challenges and problems, and the emotional and human touch needs to be remembered. With the requirements of multi-channelled communication, customer encounters are becoming more and more challenging. Technical excellence is not enough, but understanding customer behaviour and emotions is crucial. The age of the customer challenges companies to create experiential digital services instead of mere efficiency. Digital customer experience includes value proposition, human-centred innovation, and experiences (Tussyadiah 2014) along all the touch points of the digital customer journey (Zomerdijk & Voss 2010). These can be analysed with the sensorial, emotional and behavioural dimensions of Gentile et al. (2007) to understand the elements that create a customer experience. Gentile et al. (2007) also noticed that customer involvement and commitment were more substantial if several dimensions were present in the service. This paper studies the emotional customer responses to one webpage to determine the triggers creating emotions and thus resulting in actions. Laboratory experiments and thematic interviews were used as a method to help to form digital tourism experiences better. As a result, it can be stated that there is much to do to create positive emotional effects instead of frustration and anger. The study showed that even the pragmatic dimension failed in customer experience, and the sensorial dimension settled with vision. Even though this study functioned as a pilot for future research, it provided insights to the companies and increased the understanding of applying Gentile's dimensions of customer experience. While the tourism and hospitality industry is considered an experienced business, adding all the customer experience dimensions to the online channels and communication is recommended to increase customer involvement and, thus, customer loyalty.

Customer encounter satisfaction and narrative force: an investigation of user-generated content on TripAdvisor

ABSTRACT Customer satisfaction research is often undertaken quantitatively employing multi-item standard questionnaires. Instead, this study seeks to understand how restaurant customers themselves articulate their encounter satisfaction experiences from the user-generated content (UGC) reviews they post on TripAdvisor. UGC reviews for all fine dining restaurants in Stockholm are collected. Leximancer and Diction software are used in the analyses to determine the concepts and themes used by UGC reviewers to express their encounter satisfaction and to measure narrative force among customers expressing different levels of restaurant encounter satisfaction. Results indicate that customers who provide different satisfaction scores on TripAdvisor also post UGC that exhibits divergencies in the concepts and themes they use to communicate their experience. Additionally, narrative force is stronger among customers providing reviews exhibiting moderate and low satisfaction scores.

Constructive Resistance in the Frontlines: How Frontline Employees’ Resistance to Customer Incivility Affects Customer Observers

Frontline employees (FLEs) often face customer incivility—rude or demeaning remarks, verbal aggression, or hostile gestures. Although incivility from customers is rising at an alarming rate, most organizations refuse to act decisively to protect their FLEs and stop customer incivility. This research asserts that an organizational policy of ignoring and accepting incivility from customers is neither a wise business strategy nor has positive outcomes. In contrast, customer incivility should be handled promptly and decisively. Specifically, the authors present FLE Constructive Resistance (FLE CR) as a strategy to confront customer incivility. The authors conduct interviews with FLEs, develop a Constructive Resistance (CR) scale to fit the context of FLE–customer encounters, and test a conceptual model to examine the impact of CR by FLEs. The results suggest that customers who observe incivility perpetrated by fellow customers respond positively to FLE CR, including greater future purchase intention, greater positive word-of-mouth intention, and reduced future misbehavior intention. These effects are mediated by the observer’s perceived fairness of the FLE’s CR. Finally, the indirect effects of FLE’s CR on observer outcomes are more likely to manifest in customers with higher moral identity as well as newer customers.

Feelings and Scenes of Rural Homestay Inns in China: A Perspective of Service Encounter

As a new form of business, rural homestay inn is booming in China, boosting the transformation and upgrading of leisure tourism and promoting the sustainable development of rural tourism. This study firstly emphasizes the humanistic care in the service process through the content analysis of 30 short videos and the findings that such hotels highlight the word “warmth” in their marketing. Based on this, this study clarifies that in the Chinese context, encounter is essential for gaining warmth. Therefore, the study constructs a model with service encounter as the core concept and explores customer loyalty in rural homestay inns. A total of 450 questionnaires were distributed, of which, 407 were valid. In addition, descriptive statistical analysis, reliability test, correlation analysis, and multiple linear regression analyses were conducted on the collected questionnaires. Results show the following: (1) service encounter includes physical environment encounter, service personnel encounter, and other customer encounter; (2) experience value includes functional emotional and social cognitive values; (3) physical environment encounter and service personnel encounter significantly affect the experience value; (4) physical environment encounter and service personnel encounter significantly affect customer loyalty; and (5) functional emotional and social cognitive values positively affect customer loyalty, and social cognitive value affects more significantly. On this basis, this study introduces the following suggestions: (1) highlighting the characteristics of rural homestay inns and creating a unique cultural atmosphere, (2) paying attention to human care and deepening emotional communication, and (3) improving the customer experience to satisfy higher consumer demand.

The impact of workplace safety and customer misbehavior on supermarket workers' stress and psychological distress during the COVID-19 pandemic

PurposeEssential frontline workers in the retail sector face increased exposure risks to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) due to frequent interactions with the general public. Often these interactions are fraught with controversies over public safety protocols. The purpose of this study is to examine the impacts of frontline workers' perceptions of workplace safety and customer misbehaviors on their stress and psychological distress to inform managing workplace health and safety during public health crises.Design/methodology/approachThe authors conducted an online survey of 3,344 supermarket workers in the state of Arizona (US) during the state's first COVID-19 pandemic wave in July 2020. Measures included mental health distress, and perceptions of workplace safety and customer behaviors. The authors utilized a mixed-methods approach combining multiple regression analyses with qualitative analyses of open-ended comments.FindingsWorkers reported high rates of stress and psychological distress. Increases in mental health morbidity were correlated with perceptions of being unsafe in the workplace and concerns about negative customer encounters. Qualitative analyses reveal frustration with management's efforts to reduce risks intertwined with feelings of being unsafe and vulnerable to threatening customer encounters.Practical implicationsThe findings highlight the need to provide and enforce clear safety guidelines, including how to manage potential hostile customer interactions, to promote positive health workplace management during a pandemic.Originality/valueThis study is among the first to assess the COVID-19 pandemic's impact on the mental health of non-health care frontline essential workers and presents novel insights regarding perceived customer misbehavior and need for management support and guidance in a public health crisis.

Driving to Make Dollars and Sense: Self-Narrative Construction under Algorithmic Management

Based on the results of an autoethnographic field study involving 130 hours of personal driving experience as a food delivery driver, in-person and virtual meetings with company representatives, and semi-structured interviews (N = 40) with current rideshare and food/grocery delivery drivers, I elaborate the self-narrative construction process affecting drivers in the on-demand economy. My findings reveal that drivers resist the depersonalizing consequences of algorithmic management by harnessing personalizing experiences that occur in the on-demand workspaces (e.g., driver’s personal vehicle). Specifically, drivers respond to experiences stemming from momentary customer encounters that occur in these intimate spaces by forging temporal connections to their past and desired future selves – aided by fantasy and rationalization at times – in a way that adds structure and agency to their self-narratives. This process, which I call narrative structuring, helps drivers combat identity-threatening aspects of their work and craft a more coherent self-narrative. However, persistent loneliness fuels drivers’ desire for social support and social comparison which drivers satisfy in online sentient communities through a form of storytelling that I call narrative flexing, the identity implications of which depend on the narrative’s intergroup versus interpersonal focus. Overall, I advance theorizing on self-narratives and narrative identity work while illuminating the struggles of a vast, yet understudied class of workers.

Sociability in Virtual Reality

This study investigates sociability in the context of immersive Virtual Reality (VR). A Design Science Research process was applied, and three iterative development versions of a VR application were studied. Sociability around the technology was investigated with two theoretical perspectives: social presence and social interactions. The results of qualitative interviews and observations as well as a quantitative experiment are combined to make a proposal for four design principles enhancing the beneficial sociability of VR systems. These principles address the importance of ease-of-use and personalization in the activation of a customer, customer empowerment and emancipation through familiarization, creating real-world connections and surprising content, as well as adding informative elements and streamlining the customer encounter and service process. The proposed design principles are empirically linked through social behaviors and emotions to cognitive outcomes representing beneficial sociability, e.g., improved customer motivation, willingness-to-share, value communications, co-creation, and co-innovation.

Rejecting consumer complaints in customer encounters on Twitter - the case of English and Polish brand communication

AbstractThe following study focuses on strategies of denial and evasion of company responsibility used in responding to complaints, negative and critical comments posted by consumers on English and Polish brand profiles on Twitter. The analysis shows that despite the face-threat these acts may pose to the consumer and, consequently, to the company’s image, the companies do not refrain from using strategies denying the complainable and disagreeing with the customer. The study shows that companies resort to a range of sub-strategies of evasion and denial of blame, such as referral to external circumstances and regulations, thanks, blaming a third party, statements of unawareness of the complainable, simple denial of the complainable, expression of personal opinion or criticism of the consumer, among others. The study indicated differences between the English and Polish profiles as to the range and frequency of use of the strategies of rejecting consumers’ complaints. The Polish corpus offers a greater occurrence and a wider range of evasion and denial strategies used in reaction to consumers’ negative or critical opinions and complaints.

Authenticity, rapport and interactional justice in frontline service: the moderating role of need for uniqueness

PurposeThis paper aims to investigate how perceptions of employee authenticity and customer–employee rapport influence customers’ interactional justice assessments and related service evaluations, and how customers’ need for uniqueness impacts these relationships.Design/methodology/approachA multi-method, three-study design is used to test the research model. Specifically, structural equation modeling provides tests of the main hypotheses, and two supplemental experimental studies tease out conditional effects providing insightful managerial contributions.FindingsResults indicate that customers’ perceptions of employee authenticity affect customers’ interactional justice evaluations, particularly when customers identify high levels of customer–employee rapport. Additionally, the aforementioned relationships are contingent upon customers’ need for uniqueness, such that customers with higher levels of need for uniqueness experience lower levels of customer–employee rapport and, consequently, provide poorer interactional justice assessments. Finally, conditional effects are found given the type of provider and frequency of visit.Originality/valueThis research extends prior efforts to understand how customer–employee dynamics influence customers’ service encounter evaluations. In particular, it furthers understanding of authentic FLE–customer encounters, explores drivers of interactional justice and explicates how consumers’ varying levels of need for uniqueness have differential effects on service outcomes.

CUSTOMER INTIMACY VALUE STRATEGY BY IMPLEMENTING CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT

This article talks about a lot of systems to transform customers into resources proposed for organizations while making faithful customers. The technique that is the focal point in this article is customer Relationship Management (CRM). This is on the grounds that without a CRM system, organizations neglect to reap the advantages of CRM. CRM is fundamentally significant for the organization's future. CRM innovation empowers organizations to all the more likely comprehend customer conduct, foresee their conduct later on, give altered customer encounters, and assemble long haul customer connections. Nonetheless, given that CRM is just restricted by innovation it will be a serious mix-up for the organization. Organizations can't give excellent customer worth, administration and experience just by putting resources into CRM innovation. This article depicts customer life cycle the executives and proposes an all encompassing system for customer life cycle the board. This section finishes by examining methodologies for transforming customers into resources and making satisfied customers.

Complaint management on Twitter – evolution of interactional patterns on Polish corporate profiles

AbstractThe study concerns complaint management on Polish brand profiles on Twitter. The aim was to investigate selected language properties of corporate tweets and trace potential changes in the interactional patterns on the profiles occurring between 2015 and 2017. The study focuses on the structure and frequency of the respective strategies, as well as formality, the use of non-standard structures and emoticons. The study indicates the following directions of change: an increase in the use of address terms and explanations, a greater degree of language formality and indirectness, among others. The changes point to increased formulaicity and conventionalisation of expression, as well as an increased use of fixed patterns and templates. The changes constitute evidence of standardisation of the means of expression in customer encounters and a transfer of the conventions typical of other channels of interaction with consumers to the online context.

Free-riding and cost-bearing in discrimination

We study how the temporal positions in which a disadvantaged person (e.g., an unattractive-looking customer) and an advantaged person (e.g., an attractive-looking customer) encounter an actor (e.g., a vendor) influence the treatment they get from the actor (e.g., the prices the vendor offers). Three experiments, including a field experiment and a pre-registered experiment, incorporate three types of personal attributes (physical appearance, nationality, and gender) and find both a free-riding effect for the disadvantaged person and a cost-bearing effect for the advantaged person. Specifically, the disadvantaged person receives better treatment by following the advantaged person, and the advantaged person receives worse treatment by following the disadvantaged person. These effects occur only if the attribute that differentiates the disadvantaged and advantaged persons is perceived as unjustifiable, and they disappear if the attribute is perceived as justifiable, suggesting that these effects are due not to anchoring, but to the actor’s need for justifiability. This research highlights the importance of choice architecture in discrimination and its prevention.

“Untact”: a new customer service strategy in the digital age

The Industry 4.0 era has brought a shift in consumers’ purchasing behaviors from traditional retailing to online and/or mobile channels, triggered by advanced digital technologies and an easy access to the global market. Smart digital devices and advanced technologies have enabled “untact” service, facilitating customer encounters without a face-to-face contact with employees. This study presents the concept of untact service based on a review of the literature on technology-enabled customer encounters with service providers and analysis of several real-world cases. The results indicate that untact services are becoming widespread in various areas of daily life, such as ordering food at franchise restaurants via digital devices, handling financial transactions without visiting a bank branch through e-banking apps, and using online or mobile order systems for a multitude of products/services. This study elaborates implications of untact service in terms of new opportunities and challenges involved when it is implemented as a new customer service strategy.

Towards customer-induced service orchestration - requirements for the next step of customer orientation

This position paper acknowledges that customer orientation is a key requirement for companies to be competitive in the marketplace. Customer orientation has led to concepts, such as personalization, one-to-one-marketing, mass customization and co-creation, which all strive for a strong alignment of individual customer demands and encounters with a company’s offerings. Despite the customer is increasingly regarded as an active partner, the overall perspective of customer orientation is still mainly provider-oriented. Adopting the perspective of customers, as argued in this position paper, would help recognizing that customer problems are often broader and more complex than the solutions of single providers. While intermediaries and, more recently, assistants based on artificial intelligence, have emerged to address this demand, their approaches are typically little transparent and follow a black-box paradigm. Using examples from multiple application domains, this position paper proposes elements that need to be addressed to overcome these shortcomings. The concept of customer-induced service orchestration and management shall empower customers to combine services from multiple service providers in order to address their problems in a transparent and white-box way. This approach could represent an important next step in customer orientation.

Mobile-Controlled UAVs for Audio Delivery Service and Payload Tracking Solution

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles are self-driving vehicles in robotic technology, which are in incremental demand for transportation. In this paper, re-engineering the UAVs model for payload delivery service to enhance the feature of tracking, communication of recorded audio voices, and enlarging of new process to deliver a partial control of the UAVs especially for the customers is being discussed. In the present study, integration of UAVs and mobile technology has been adopted for re-engineering of the UAV based delivery process. The fundamental approach of the present study is to involve the customer in the entire process of payload delivery under effective coordination to provide customer-oriented functionality which will improve the customer encounter in logistics operations. People don’t get to visit his/her loved one’s grave due to lack of time, busy schedule or traffic congestion. Visiting of graveyard is unfriendly for elderly too because of their health issues. Today, by the coordination of developed sensor and IT innovation, visiting of graveyard has become simple. To be perfect and reasonable, artifacts of the proposed model can easily be implemented for the virtual visiting of graveyard. By utilization of the proposed model, individuals and particularly elderly or women can easily visit the loved one’s grave from the comfort of their home by watching ongoing recordings of the blooming activity on grave or tomb. Furthermore people can send recorded audio, voice message or Quran recitation from his/her registered mobile app at the graveyard. The proposed model is evaluated by conducting survey-based quantitative research approach based on the Delphi method. The performance of the model is analyzed by the goodness-of-fit (Chi-square) test. The inspection of the overall outcome against the re-engineering model and its provided service efficiency has a greater impact of acceptance.

The ‘customer journey’: Learning from customers in tourism experience encounters

For micro-tourism firms, customers are a readily-accessible and highly important knowledge source that often remains unutilised. This study explores firm–customer encounters along the customer journey as learning opportunities. Based on data collected through participant observations, interviews and a review of user-generated content, this case study provides an in-depth look into the customer journey, with a Swedish micro-tourism firm. The findings suggest that the possibility to generate knowledge about experiential purposes is conditioned by the firm's ability to bestow encounters with an experience-like quality and promote the customers' transformation into participants. This is facilitated by involving customers, adopting an experiential discourse and utilising in-situ supporting moments to socialise. Firms can also learn about customers' subjective perception of value from user-generated content. The study concludes that in the context of learning from customers, small size provides micro-tourism firms with an opportunity to engage in personal relationships with their customers.

Estimation of Sample for Data Mining of Alliance Policy

There is expanding enthusiasm for sharing the experience of items and services on the web stage, and online networking has opened a route for item and specialist co-ops to comprehend their customers’ needs and desires. In the paper investigates audits by cloud purchasers that reflect customer's encounters with cloud services. The audits of around 6, 000 cloud benefit clients were broke down utilizing conclusion examination to distinguish the disposition of each survey, and to decide if the feeling communicated was sure, negative, or impartial. The examination utilized two data mining devices such as RapidMiner and KNIME, the outcomes were thought about. to Create four expectation models in the investigation to calculate the reaction of client's reviews. The proposed method depends on four directed machine learning calculations: K-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN), Naive Bayes (NB), Random Tree (RT), and Random Forest (RF). Based on Experimental evaluations, proposed algorithm improves accuracy 7.82%, and reduces Error Rate 7.82% of the proposed framework contrasted than previous classifiers.

Modeling event attendees’ experiences during customer-customer encounters (CCEs)

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to explore how event attendees experience interactive encounters in the most competitive segment of the business sector of events – conferences.Design/methodology/approachA total of 26 in-depth personal interviews was conducted with previous conference attendees. Line-by-line open coding, axial coding and selective coding are performed.FindingsThis study develops a framework for experiences during customer–customer encounters (CCEs), which presents a dual motivational structure that explains one’s participation in CCEs, a classification of typical CCEs, four processes that one experiences during CCEs and three levels of situational factors that influence experiences during CCEs.Originality/valueThis study makes one of the first attempts to propose a multidimensional conceptualization of CCE experiences using an attendee perspective. Beyond the utilitarian and social benefits, this study suggests that it is important for event studies to explore the psychological and emotional meanings of CCE experiences through an experiential lens and that the competitive battleground in event industry should lie in staging memorable experiences during CCEs.