Encounter Employees Research Articles

Social regard: a link between waiting for service and service outcomes

The purpose of this study is to investigate the intervening role that social regard plays in the customer wait situation. Social regard is defined as making the customer feel valued in the social interaction. An experimental study highlights how variables such as actual wait length, friendliness of the service encounter employee and an employee apology can interact to influence service outcomes in a cafe setting. Social regard was shown to be the dominant influence on repeat visitation and positive word of mouth and thus provides further explanatory power to the wait situation.

Meniere's Disease

Meniere's disease affects 615,000 individuals in the United States. Therefore, occupational health nurses may encounter employees who express symptoms of Meniere's disease or have been diagnosed with this problem. When nurses have an understanding of the symptoms of Meniere's disease, they can validate clients' concerns by directing them to an otolaryngologist or audiologist for further evaluation. Awareness of Meniere's disease may aid in counseling individuals during their annual education and training that is required to maintain an effective hearing conservation program.

Service Encounter Mismatches: A Conceptual Framework Integrating It and Job Design

As the services sector becomes a larger component of our national economy, itbecomes increasingly critical that the management of service operations isaddressed systematically. One concern is the interaction of service employeesand the technology making up the job design. Effectively matching job design andtechnology leads to effective service encounters, while mismatches cause shortrunor long run problems for the organization.Organizational mismatches between job design and supporting infrastructure,specifically the information technology (IT) selected, can give rise to the use andexercise of judgment and discretion by service encounter employees that from theviewpoint of the organization or the customer is extraordinary, conflicted or perverse.Perverse judgments debilitate the organization and degrade the quality of the serviceencounter. Conflicted and extraordinary judgments ultimately debilitate theorganization and may degrade the quality of the service encounter if some customersshould perceive others as having received preferential treatment. This paper exploresdynamics in managing operations, technology, and human resources that give rise tothe exercise of such judgments with the intent to construct a conceptual frameworkthat will explain such judgments and the behaviors that issue from them.