Mary Jo Bitner, Bernard H.

Booms, Mary Stanfield Tetreault

The Service Encounter : Diagnosing Favorable and Unfavorable Incidents

Service industries continue to grow, while at the same time service quality is
generally perceived as decreasing. This article is about a study of critical service
encounters in three service industries, based on 700 incidents colected from
customers of airlines, hotels and restaurants. The purpose of this study is to find
what specific events lead to satisfying or dissatisfying service encounters from the
customers point of view, and what actions of contact employees cause these
events.
The service encounter is defined as the interaction between a customer and service
provider, in which both customers and service providers have roles to enact.
A lot of studies demonstrated the importance of the human interaction element in
evaluating service quality and service satisfaction. Unlike the study described in this
article, all other studies were general and applicable to one specific industry.
In this study the critical incident method (CIT) was used to identify the underluing
sources of both satisfactory and dissatisfactory service encounters from the
customers point of view. An incident is defined as an observable human activity
that permit conclusions about the person performing the act. A critical incident is
one that contributes to or detracts from the general aim of the activity in a
significant way. The CIT is a classification technique utilizes both qualitative and
quantitative datas.
The research was conducted by Andersson and Nilsson in 1964.
Data was collected by 75 students, that were trained to ask people of a satisfying or
disatisfying interaction with an employee of an airline, hotel or restaurant. They
collect 347 satisfactory and 352 disatisfactory incident from people with a range
from 16 to 82 years.
After collecting data, the incidents were sorted, combined and resorted into 3 major
groups and 12 categories according to similarities in the reported experiences.
The major group 1 is about employees response to service delivery system failure.
The content or form of the employee response to the consumer complaints or
disappointments determines the customers perceived satisfaction or
dissatisfaction. The group 1 includes 3 categories. The categorie 1A is about the
response of employee to normally avaible services that are lacking or absent. The
categorie 1B is about the response of employee to unreasonably slow service. And
the third categorie 1C is about the response of employee to other core service
failure. In all categories the acknowledge of the problem, the explanation, the
apologizing and the offering of compensation can lead to satistactory experience.
but acting like nothing is wrong, not explaining, or making customers fault leaves a
dissatisfactory experience.
The group 2 includes employee response to customer special needs and requests. It
includes 4 categories. The categorie 2A involves cutomers with special medical ,
dietary , psychological or language difficulties. Failure to recognize the seriousness
of the problem can result in a dissatisfactory incident. The category 2B includes the
response to special requests. The accomodating attutude and initiative are

welcomed. The category 2C includes the response to admitted customer error. And
finaly, the categorie 2D includes response to potentially disruptive others.
And the third group includes unprompted and unsolicited employee actions like
pleasant surprise or rudeness and discrimination. It includes 5 categories. The
categorie 3A is about the attention or the ignorance paid to customer. The categorie
3B includes truly out-of-the-ordinary employee behavior like expressions of
courtesy, gifts or profanity and rudeness. The categorie 3C includes the employee
behaviors in the context of cultural norms. The categorie 3D is a gestalt evaluation,
which represents a combination of dis /satisfactory actions. And finaly, the last
categorie 3E is a satisfactory incidend resulted of the way a contact employee
handle a strssful situation.
The study revealed 23,3 % of satisfactory incident in group 1, 33,9 % in group 2 and
43,8% in group 3. Also we have 42,9% of dissatisfactory incident in group 1, 15,6 %
in group 2 and 41,5 % in group 3.
The study reveals also that though the underluing causes appear to be the same ,
the frequency of occurrence differs when satisfactory and dissatisfactory incidents
are compared.
More, the study prooves that there are generic behaviors that could be
associated with dis/satisfactory service encounters.
In conclusion the classification system that emerged from the data can be
applicable to other high-contact service industries. Also, it demonstrates that
employees should be trained, empowered and should have knowledges to inform
customers about the problem and solutions.