Flying to Quality: Cultural Influences on Online Reviews

Customers increasingly consult opinions expressed online before making their final decisions. However, inherent factors such as culture may moderate the criteria and the weights individuals use to form their expectations and evaluations. Therefore, not all opinions expressed online match customers’ personal preferences, neither can firms use this information to deduce general conclusions. Our study explores this issue in the context of airline services using Hofstede’s framework as a theoretical anchor. We gauge the effect of each dimension as well as that of cultural distance between the passenger and the airline on the overall satisfaction with the flight as well as specific service factors. Using topic modeling, we also capture the effect of culture on review text and identify factors that are not captured by conventional rating scales. Our results provide significant insights for airline managers about service factors that affect more passengers from specific cultures leading to higher satisfaction/dissatisfaction

Service breakdowns and service evaluations: The role of customer attributions

When a service breaks down service providers are likely to use damage control strategies while customers are likely to engage in attributional processes to explain what has occurred. Video vignettes were developed to test the effects of a range of damage control strategies on customer attributions. Attributions about employee effort was the major predictor of customers’ levels of satisfaction and service quality judgements. Attributions varied with communication style, explanation for service failure and offer type

Chinese Travelers' Group Decision-Making

This study investigates Chinese travelers’ group decision-making. Small groups were recruited to participate in a simulated travel decision-making task where each group selected either an international destination or a domestic destination for the group vacation. This study examines travelers’ group decision-making from the content (i.e., topics) and the process (i.e., verbal and non-verbal interaction process) perspectives. Analysis of the content of group discussions reveals twelve key topics. Participants’ verbal behaviors are analyzed following Bales’ Interaction Process Analysis, and non-verbal behaviors are examined based on seven non-verbal displays. This study provides insights into understanding group travel decision-making among Chinese travelers

Stakeholder reactions to company crisis communication and causes

Despite the burgeoning number of studies examining stakeholder effects of crisis communication and crisis causes, the varied categorizations used, together with inconsistent findings, has meant that knowledge gaps remain. Specifically, existing studies have not established whether a significant hierarchy of best communicated accounts exist that minimize crisis impact on stakeholder reactions. In addition, whether different crisis causes have different emotional, attitudinal and behavioral outcomes still requires examination. Further, crisis emotion research has been limited and has predominantly investigated anger and sympathy, indicating the need to explore a greater variety of crisis emotions.This investigation of the impact of a hierarchy of five crisis communication accounts and four crisis causes on multiple stakeholder reactions elicited several key findings. Although " confession" was the most preferred crisis account, " no comment" was almost as successful in mitigating negative reactions. Counterintuitively, confession reduced responsibility judgments. No comment was second to confession in mitigating negative, and promoting positive, reactions. Further, company control of a crisis was found to be the single most powerful predictor of stakeholder reactions. Involvement elicited multiple positive and negative crisis emotions, while different emotion categories elicited different behavioral intentions. Attitude to the company also impacted behavioral intentions. © 2010 Elsevier Inc

Customer's angry voice: Targeting employees or the organization?

Poor service encounters have the potential to leave customers feeling angry at the frontline service employee who serves them, angry at the organization, or angry at both parties. The 25 in-depth interviews (Study 1) and experimental work (Study 2) demonstrate how distributive (outcome fairness), procedural (response time) and interactional (treatment received) justice dimensions differentially affect where the customer targets her or his anger, either at the frontline employee or at the organization as a whole. Further investigation reveals sins-of-omission (when the service provider failed to act) and interactional justice mediate the effect of response time on anger at the employee. Interactional justice also partially mediates the effect of outcome fairness on anger at the organization whereas sins-of-omission do not. © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

Cooling off and backing out: understanding consumer decisions to rescind a product purchase

Consumers sometimes have the right to exit a sales contract during what is known as a cooling-off period. Sales process research generally does not address cases when consumers withdraw from sales contracts during this period. Since securing product sales involves substantialmarketing and sales costs, a need exists to better understand not only consumer rescission decisions and their legal context but also the managerial implications of the cooling-off period. This exploratory qualitative study examines purchase rescinding and develops a conceptual model using timeshare as the context. Results suggest that rescission relates to a mismatch between product features and personal circumstances, post-purchase concerns about product value, reassessment of financial capability, reflections on sales presentations, and cautionary influences of reference groups.Griffith Business School, Department of Tourism, Sport and Hotel ManagementNo Full Tex