Service Management

Session 2. The Service Encounter

Dr Kate Blackmon
Tuesday 29th April
 Aims and objectives
• This session will focus on the service encounter
between the customer and the service organisation.
• Key questions include:
1. What is the role of the service encounter in
delivering services?
2. How do the two organisational objectives of
operational efficiency and customer responsiveness
affect the design and execution of the service
encounter?
3. How can process maps (such as service blueprints)
help organisations differentiate their service
offerings?
 The customer encounter
• Definitions of service encounter
– Period of time during which a customer interacts with
a service (Shostack 1984)
– Dyadic interaction with service provider (Surprenant
and Solomon 1987)
– Customer interacts directly with the service
organisation (Bitner 1990)
• Interactions can be with:
– Front-line service employees or self-service
technology facilities (Meuter et al. 2000)
• “After training, Sutton worked as a bucket two collector for about 20
hours. The morning of the first day was spent sitting with an
experienced collector, listening to calls on a headset and watching
his computer screen. After each call, and sometimes during a call,
using a mute button, the experienced collector offered opinions
about debtors, explained why he had used a given collection
strategy, and shared his philosophy of debt collection. Sutton spent
the afternoon making calls under his guidance. After this brief
apprenticeship, he worked part-time for three nights (about four
hours a night) making collection calls.”
• Rafaeli, Anat, & Sutton, Robert I. 1991. Emotional contrast
strategies as means of social influence: Lessons from criminal
interrogators and bill collectors, Academy of Management Journal,
Vol. 34 Issue 4, pp. 749-775.
• “How do I stand close enough to study someone without
being noticed? It’s crucial to our work that shoppers don’t
realise that they’re being observed. There’s no other way
to be sure that we’re seeing natural behaviour. Fact is,
we’re all still surprised by how close you can stand to
someone in a store and still remain invisible. We find that
positioning yourself behing the shopper is a bad idea –
we all know the sensation we’re being watched. But if
you stand to the side of a shopper, his or her peripheral
vision ‘reads’ you as just another customer – harmless,
in other words, and barely worth noticing.”
• Paco Underhill, Why We Buy. p. 14.
 Dramaturgical approaches
• Approaches the service encounter behaviour as “drama” and the
service encounter as “theatre” (Grove & Fisk 1983)
– Derived from sociologists such as Burke and Goffman who
applied symbolic interactionism to human behaviour in social
settings
• Each contact becomes a potential “moment of truth” that reveals the
underlying ethos of the service provider
• This perspective emphasises the wider context of the service
encounter, e.g.,
– Cultural values
– Roles and scripts
– Code-switching
 Aspects of dramaturgical research
into service encounters
• Aspects focused on by researchers include:
– Emotion (e.g., humour, embarassment, emotional contagion)
– Distance
– Cross-cultural
– Positive / negative evaluations
– Duration (e.g., Transaction versus Relationships)
– Links to service quality, customer satisfaction, commitment, and
loyalty
• “The degree to which the customer evaluates the experience as
either positive or negative and adopts approach or avoidance
behaviors is largely influenced by the emotions experienced during
service encounters” (Grace 2007)
 Operational approaches
• Efficiency of interactions are influenced by servicescape
and by design of service processes

Chain of service
encounters
Organisation External context

Encounter
Provider Recipient

3rd party

Focus is moved away from the person and to the system

 Servicescape
Environmental Physical Signs, symbols,
conditions architecture artefacts

Servicescape

Provider Recipient
responses responses

Interactions

Provider Recipient
behaviours behaviours

Servicescape concept originated by Bitner (1992)

Some manifestations
 Queuing
• In managing service operations, managing queuing
includes managing aspects of:

– Staffing

– Process design

– Perceptions
 Mathematical modelling and
Single-
simulation
Single
stage
queue
processing

Passport
Parallel
control
queues

Random
arrivals
Multiple-
stage
processing
 Behavioural aspects of queuing
Maister’s laws
• Unoccupied time feels longer than
occupied time
• Pre-process waits feel longer than
in-process waits
• Anxiety makes waits feel longer
• Uncertain waits are longer than
known, finite waits
• Unexplained waits are longer than
explained waits
• Unfair waits are longer than
equitable waits
• The more valuable the service, the
longer people will wait
• Solo waits feel longer than group
waits

Maister (1984), Katz, Larson & Larson (1991)

 Behavioural aspects of queuing
Maister’s laws
• Unoccupied time feels longer than occupied time
• Pre-process waits feel longer than in-process waits
• Anxiety makes waits feel longer
• Uncertain waits are longer than known, finite waits
• Unexplained waits are longer than explained waits
• Unfair waits are longer than equitable waits
• The more valuable the service, the longer people will wait
• Solo waits feel longer than group waits

Maister (1984), Katz, Larson & Larson (1991)

 Effectiveness versus
responsiveness
• http://www.nbc.com/Saturday_Night_Live/video/play.sht
ml?mea=2807