Tourist Customer Service Satisfaction

An Encounter Approach

Francis Noe, Muzaffer Uysal, Vincent Magnini

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136975974
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Customer Relations
• Index: Business

Customer satisfaction and loyalty in the tourism sector is highly dependent upon the behaviours of front-line service providers. Service is about people, how they relate to one another, fulfill each other's needs and ultimately care for each other. Yet surprisingly there are few or any books which focus on the detailed specifics of the social exchange and interaction between the service provider and customer.

Tourist Customer Service Satisfaction fully explores this relationship by defining the specific kind of verbal and non-verbal messages needed for successful exchanges, outlining how the service provider ought to behave & cope in a situation as well as detailing positive approaches that enhance a service provider's role performance. The book uses encounter theory to examine the customer – provider relationship as well as drawing on current research and theories from hospitality, tourism, management, psychology bodies of literature. In doing so the book offers important insight into how employee – centric competitive advantage in this sector can be achieved in various markets.

This book is unique in its approach by focusing on the specifics of the social exchange and interaction between the service provider and customer. It therefore offers a novel synthesis of knowledge on service satisfaction in the tourism sector which will serve as valuable pedagogical and research reference for students and academics interested in hospitality and tourism.

1
Defining encounter theory

Preview

This chapter introduces the attribution theory and proposes its appropriateness as a model to examine the customer–provider relationship and the interactions necessary to achieve a mutually satisfactory experience. The channels of interaction take place through the use of verbal and nonverbal (gestural) expressions of communication in real time. The process of exchange takes place not only between the actors – the customer and service provider – but also within each actor as they weigh and imagine different outcomes. This exchange is a kind of test case to be played out later in real time. Thus the relationship between persons stays in flux as information on expectations is shared. The second part of the chapter describes the importance of the social situations and identifies those observable attributes which help define the inter-subjective act.

Symbolic interaction and attribution theory

The framework

Into the early part of the twentieth century, explanations of human behavior were still based on so-called instincts. Whenever actions and behaviors flowed from our self, names were tagged onto the acts. In fact, the list of instincts grew to well over a hundred of these inner drives stimulating human actions. One was even termed “miscellaneous.” Perhaps it was the length of the list, and the continuing process of adding newer instincts that the theory discredited itself as an explanation of human behavior. Into this void, a more plausible approach to understanding human action and self-awareness grew from the Chicago school of social psychology of symbolic interaction.

In an outstanding historical summary on symbolic interaction theory, Prus (1996, pp. 10, 129) points out that two developers and founders are most significant: George Herbert Mead and Herbert Blumer, who represent the Chicago School. “Symbolic interaction may be envisioned as the study of the ways in which people make sense of their life-situations and the ways in which they go about their activities, in conjunction with others, on a day-to day basis.” It is cognizant of human interaction in daily relationships or exchanges taking an ethnographic perspective. George Herbert Mead is considered the father of “symbolic interactionism,” following a series of lectures in social psychology he gave at the University of Chicago. Upon Mead’s death in 1931, Herbert Blumer continued the lecture series and actually coined the phrase “symbolic interactionism.” Nevertheless, the “ter m at least has the virtue of accurately reflecting the central significance of language in the social psychology of Mead” (Farr, 1996, p. 123).

For Mead, the communication act and symbolic exchange is the basic unit of human interaction and behavioral representation. Stryker (1997, p. 316) also summarizes the thinking of George Herbert Mead. Accordingly, Mead believed that individuals could try out and manipulate symbols internally in their minds, as well as alternative solutions to situations and problems in the mind in a day-dream sort of act. Then, they “could respond reflexively to themselves and treat themselves as objects (talk to themselves in another role like a customer) akin to other objects in the world (the self).” Mead argued that the source of the mind and self was an “ongoing social process in which persons required others in order to construct their solutions to problematic situations.” Hence his well-known book Mind, Self and Society (Mead, 1934), or what we would like to narrow and redefine on a smaller scale in this work as mind, self, and the tourist customer.

The theoretical framework guiding this research effort is also built on the symbolic interaction theory of the Chicago School’s Herbert Blumer, continuing Mead’s qualitative tradition based on direct observation, where the individual is viewed as an actor, not a reactor. Such a model is not a stimulus-response theory explaining social interaction. Rather, individuals are symbol-using, symbol-creating, and symbol-designating creatures. This process, which follows an exchange in a relationship, is essentially conscious. “In its most basic form a social act involves a three-part relationship”: a gesture or symbolic act initiated by an individual, perceived by another, and mutually responded to by both parties (Littlejohn, 1983, p. 47). Following in this tradition, we also apply an outgrowth of this theory. This emphasis is adopted from the Iowa School, centered on the work of Manford Kuhn, which includes the sub-area of role theory, in which individuals respond according to how their social titles define their social positions.

Both of these perspectives are integrated into our investigation of the service provider responding to the customer on the frontline.

However, neither emphasis curtailed the use of observational studies. “Many empirical studies in the symbolic interactionist tradition of social psychology at Chicago were participant observational studies,” which appears to be the generic methodology for the study of social encounters (Farr, 1996, p. 28). Erving Goffman drew upon many of the unpublished dissertations after the Second World War to illustrate the “minutiae” and detail involved with encounters and social interaction. You are whom you associate with and what you do. In the end, the “theories of self-concept have emphasized that people’s self-concepts are a product of their interactions and identification with other people” (Pelham and Hetts, 1999, p. 115). In fact, this influence created by other people is even more pronounced when a product or service is publicly consumed, as in the case of tourism activities (Amaldoss and Jain, 2008) – an interesting reflection of the theory makers themselves and the kind of eyes and ears harnessed to gather data on interacting beings.

There is a methodological difference in how those interactions are viewed, based on each school’s perspective of self. According to Schubert and the interaction school, the social self is the creation of inter-subjective communication with the mind and the outside world. It is not a “solipsistic capacity”, but an “inner experience” created in conjunction with the outside world” (Cooley, 1998, pp. 21, 23). In other words, “one’s social identity develops itself through symbolically mediated interaction with one’s surroundings.” The mechanisms that mediate between the self and society are “communication, sympathetic introspection, and understanding” (Cooley, 1998, pp. 23, 161, 164). “The social self is simply any idea, or system of ideas, drawn from the communicative life that the mind cherishes as its own.” “A self-idea of this sort seems to have three principal elements: the imagination of our appearance to the other person; the imagination of his judgment of that appearance; and some sort of self feeling such as pride or modification” transpiring between the persons. Adults “imagine the whole thing at once and their idea differs from that of a child chiefly in comparative richness and complexity of the elements that accompany and interpret the visible or audible sign” (Cooley, 1998, p. 173). Reflecting the insight of the early social interaction theorists at the turn and early part of the century, Troyer and Younts (1997, p. 720) point out that “social interaction is guided by our ability to read the interpretations others make of us and our actions (in or out of their presence) and adjust our behavior to correspond in a meaningful way to those expectations.” They propose that both first-order expectations held by oneself, and second-order interactions held by others for oneself, guide social action. They conclude that the expectations of others matter most, but not under all conditions. Although their test results are not that inconclusive, the effects of a person’s perceived social status did make a difference to how a person interpreted another’s expectations.

Regarding those perceptions, symbolic functions can be subdivided, according to Dittmar (1996, pp. 157, 159), into “categorical symbols” expressing a person’s social standings, wealth, status, and group memberships; and “self-expressive symbols” representing a person’s unique qualities, including values, attitudes, and personal history. Consumer objects and travel are part of the way in which persons represent themselves to the world (Ahuvia, 2005), and travel consumption is intricately involved in our leisure activities, emotions, self-expression, and social relations (Plog, 2001). Influencing many of these consumer choices is our social economic status and also our values and attitudes about what how we view certain worldly activities and pleasures, such as certain kinds of tourist exchange.

As a follow-up to the earlier work of the theorists at the Chicago School, the new Iowa School of symbolic interaction took up the cause, using laboratory and innovative technology to analyze a social exchange between two or more individuals. The central emphasis is upon “how two people join their separate lines of behavior together to construct cooperative social interaction” (Hintz and Miller, 1995, pp. 355, 366). Such social acts are composed of three phases: opening, middle, and closing. The opening constitutes “the transitional phase between independent actions and interdependent interaction” (Hintz and Miller, 1995, pp. 357, 361, 262). Such action is not established until “each person acts in a way that does not challenge the other’s definition of the relationship.” Hence, this line of reasoning serves as a basis for beginning an exchange between travel customer and service provider. A certain taking for granted is assumed “in the context of some idea about how we fit together.” As a service provider assisting a tourist, the assumed role is to help, assist, and care for the needs of the customer by communicating that the provider acknowledges that they are there to be at a customer’s bidding. “Every time we fly somewhere, we deal with an airline or travel agency; very few of us fly in our own planes” (Gutek, 1995, p. 161). Airplanes are not just wings and engines, but are also pilots and passengers. Unlike animals, which respond directly, people respond to stimuli mediated by their symbolic world. What you see is not always what you think. Bower (1992, p. 203), in reviewing the work of some psychologists, suggests that “the desire to predict and control the world gets translated into inferences about the inner traits of others,” often biasing impressions. Thus unrealistic expectations about human behavior, or even realistic expectations, are “often fostered by a lack of appreciation for the ways in which situations shape behavior further contribute to biased impressions.” There is need to socially define or make sense out of our interactions and the situations when they occur.

“The stimuli impinging upon people are given meaning through cognitive processes and then responded to according to the attached meaning” (Albrecht et al., 1987, p. 20). For example, Duck (1991, p. 42) reports on the classic late 1930s study that had male shills use their inter-subjective behavior to target ordinary females for attention as though they were highly attractive. The targeted women began to act, dress, and interact according to the definition coming from the men. This study helps show how perceptions of reality are often shaped through interpersonal transactions.

“Symbolic interaction is intersubjective to the core and envisions the development of language or ongoing symbolic interchange as fundamental to the human essence (and the human struggle for existence)” (Prus, 1996, p. 22). The study of interchanges between individuals also assumes and takes place within an organizational context, and some of the observations presented are confined to, or took place near, service front desks or in frontline situations. “Communication is the essence of relationships” and the medium of exchange. The process represents one individual to another and is “governed in part by interpersonal needs for inclusion, control, and affection. People define the situation they encounter, and adapt to those situations as defined” (Littlejohn, 1983, p. 191). In the end, the process seeks to know how the relationship affects your perceptions and needs.

In relationships, individuals monitor perceived costs and rewards. In a service situation, where dyadic relationships take place, interactive rewards and pleasure are very much the key social ingredient for maximizing customer satisfaction. It all begins with the “customers (who) ‘see into’ the organization through a unique window; the actions and words of frontline employees” (Bell and Zemke, 1992, p. 18). That is, “frontline employees are often the primary reflection of a firm’s image” (Maxham and Netemeyer, 2003, p. 46). In an interactive exchange through dialogue, people communicate various forms of verbal behavior to express the social consequences of what they mean. Some are in the form of questioning and asking to have a need fulfilled; for example, “Where is the restroom?” or “Could I have a cool drink?” Others are in the form of a declarative report about your surroundings and the environment, as in “The weather is beautiful.” Still others form communication links with the words and expressions that are said first by the speaker, who stimulates a repeated response in similar form in the listener. These expressions take the form of many ritualized greetings, such as “Good morning,” and “Good morning to you,” said in return; many of these expressions are polite exchanges in a fast-moving world of individuals and strangers interacting, and provide commonly accepted cultural exchanges. Finally, some verbal adjectives that modify a request such as “Could you do me a favor?” are then followed by your request. Such forms of expression make their way into our conventional daily communicating patterns and become part of our operating dialogue on “how we get by” and get along with others.

“You can never go wrong with face-to-face contact while there are other less direct methods of interacting; they will not be effective … if you don’t see your customers regularly” (Brown, 1999, p. 203). “A social encounter begins when one person attends to another and ends when neither can attend to the other” (Hintz and Miller, 1995, p. 358). These social connections are the first step toward a relationship process with a company. In fact, in many cases, in the eye of the customer, the frontline employee “is” the service (Garrett, 2001). “If a customer interacts with a firm for the first time, then it is this initial encounter that deter mines whether a relationship is formed and continued” (Botschen, 2000, p. 280). There are four conditions listed by Botschen (2000, p. 281) that qualify: (1) you and another are behaving, (2) you are aware of the other’s behavior, (3) the other is aware of your behavior, (4) as a result, you are both consciously aware of each other. The role performance structures a service encounter. “Each role that one plays is learned. One’s confidence that one is doing the right thing leads to performance satisfaction.

“One’s role specific self-concept is formed by reactions of others to the quality of one’s role enactment” (Solomon et al., 1985, pp. 102–4). This process is called taking the role of another, in which the customer “anticipates the other’s expected role behavior,” allowing that customer to gauge their behavior to the service provider. In this context, satisfaction with a service encounter is seen as a function of the congruence between perceived behavior and the behavior expected by role players (Oliver and Burke, 1999; Sirgy and Su, 2000). In other words, customer satisfaction is an evaluative process (Mattila and Ro, 2008, p. 298), and therefore failure of the service interaction is failure of the customer and service provider in not understanding each other’s actions and not playing their part in the service script. “Consumers can be thought of as possessing cognitive scripts for a wide variety of service encounters” (Solomon et al., 1985, p. 106). That is, script theory contends that knowledge about familiar, frequent situations is stored in one’s mind as a coherent description of events that are expected to occur (Bateson, 2002, p. 110).

The medium of exchange makes use of symbols that are both verbally spoken and nonverbal, including gestures and postures. Language embodies symbols that convey meaning (Brownell, 2000). “We plan, broker, initiate, guide, bully, love, terrorize, ter minate, justify, or challenge through words. It is in words that we engage in social interaction and it is through a better understanding of words and their use that we begin to appreciate social behavior” (Semin, 1997, p. 294). It is through this medium that humans express themselves and their intention (Brownell, 2000). “Words and sentences do not express ideas or refer to things, but serve to get things done through people or have people refer to things” (Guerin, 1994, p. 143). Verbal behavior is just another kind of behavioral action that helps mankind function. The symbolic interaction model of George Herbert Mead, as singled out by Guerin (1994, pp. 144–46), sees language as having “no meaning residing in our words beyond their social consequences.” Words also have no meaning without an active listener, who attends to the consequences of a message understood by all parties using commonly agreed upon symbols. And finally, verbal behavior is only generally reinforced, and not always taken as a direct command to act. Saying we should treat everyone in a certain manner has consequences when truly accompanied by other tangible actions. Nevertheless, “language and its strategic use is the paramount social reality within which all social psychology processing take place, are manifested and managed. It is the pursuit of the subtle but fascinating properties of this medium which brings us together, by which we cheat or influence each other, and by which we gossip or prejudge others, argue, help, or advise” (Semin, 1997, p. 302).

Social activity has given rise to “language acquisition and use … at the core of human intersubjectivity. Only when people share sets of symbols are they able to communicate with one another and act in other ways that are mindful of the viewpoints of the other” (Prus, 1996, p. 11). In enabling the link between social behavior and interaction, Semin (1997, pp. 293, 297) refers to “symbolic communication” and the “language” forms seen as the “mediators not only of cognition and consciousness but of the self and social interaction.” The messages coded and decoded through the use of language play a paramount role in the tourism sector (Dann, 1996). Levels of social classification are coded into the self and exchanges with others. Theories of the self contain both a more personal dimension, and also a more social group identification component, that Pelham and Hetts (1999, p. 116) see in explicitly how individuals consciously consider their role, and also implicitly how they associate nonconsciously in a group or social context. Both these dimensions of the self enter into the consequent influences that they have on a person’s behavior. The authors focus their efforts on the implicit affects in three studies showing that “participants endorsed explicit self-conceptions consistent with their current cultural context, a finding suggesting culture’s powerful influence on how people consciously think about themselves.” Individuals’ implicit self-concepts also influence their socialization, thus demonstrating the relative independence and persistence of implicit belief systems. Although culture may be a robust influence, individuals’ earlier and other personal experiences also continue to influence perceptions of self. What kind of role they engage in will reflect those dimensions.

Social provider and customer

Our interest is rather narrow, and views the definition of a service provider’s interaction with a customer as “face-to-face interactions between a buyer and seller in a service setting” (Solomon et al., 1985, pp. 100–101). Service encounters are human interactions: “communication between a service provider and a customer is interactive; it is a reciprocal process rather than a linear one.” “It is more accurate to think of the service provider as acting with the customer.” And as a result, “the quality of the subjective product – the service experience – is the true outcome of a service interaction.” The interaction conceptualization of meaning “is its stress on conscious interpretation,” where the parties relating to each other compare, weigh, and evaluate their symbolic exchange. The interaction process results in “nearly all that a person is and does is formed in the process of interacting symbolically with others” (Littlejohn, 1983, pp. 50–51). This kind of approach to understanding what takes place in a social exchange is based on symbolic interact...

Table of contents

• Routledge Advances in Tourism
• Contents
• About the authors
• Introduction
• 1 Defining encounter theory
• 2 Encountering interactive roles Preview
• 3 Knowing the travel customer’s role Preview
• 4 Managing the travel situation
• 5 Positioning the travel provider
• 6 Appealing to the travel and provider roles
• 7 Nuances of interpersonal interactions
• 8 Going beyond satisfaction to loyalty
• 9 Where do we go from here? Preview
• Bibliography
• Index