Cyborg Service: The Unexpected Effect of Technology in the Employee–Guest Exchange

Hotels, restaurants, and other hospitality industry operations are experimenting with self-service kiosks, tablet devices, and other technologies intended to augment or replace interactions between guests and front-line employees. While the combination of technology and people is designed to improve service, research suggests that service technologies can impede development of employee-guest rapport and lead to lower service evaluations. The studies presented in this report apply social equity theory to determine when (and why) technology can improve guests’ satisfaction with the service process and when it diminishes the guest experience. Equity theory suggests that when the use of technology prevents guests from responding to an employee’s friendly advances, guests experience psychological tension and decrease their evaluations of the service experience. The reverse situation also applies, so that when employees are less than friendly the barrier created by technology increases service evaluations by reducing guest anger. However, it is not always the case that friendly frontline staff and technology don’t mix. In a follow up field experiment, guests who used a Monscierge Connect Lobby touchscreen located not far from a bell stand preferred interacting with the technology when a hotel employee was nearby though not directly engaging guests. Thus, frontline employees should still develop a rapport with guests, but when technology acts as an “equity barrier,” the employees should provide guests with “social space,” without abandoning them entirely

Sneakerheads and Custom Kicks: Insights into Symbolic Mass Customization

This chapter presents an exploratory study involving a group of athletic shoe enthusiasts and their feelings towards customized footwear. These sneakerheads demonstrate their infatuation with sneakers via activities ranging from creating catalogs of custom shoes to buying and selling rare athletic footwear online. The key characteristic these individuals share is that, for them, athletic shoes are a fundamental fashion accessory stepped in symbolism and meaning. A series of in-depth interviews utilizing the Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET) provide a better understanding of how issues such as art, self-expression, exclusivity, peer recognition, and counterfeit goods interact with the mass customization of symbolic products by category experts

Replicating and Extending Our Understanding of How Managers Can Adjust the “Warm Glow Thermostat”

This article presents four studies that replicate and extend a recent article examining how guest participation in voluntary green programs (e.g., towel reuse) increases service satisfaction by evoking a “warm glow” response. Importantly for managers, we not only replicate across new hospitality and service contexts but also conceptualize alternative incentive paradigms, and test alternative mediators. In particular, we reconceptualize the “self-benefiting” versus “other-benefiting” incentive structure presented by Giebelhausen, Chun, Cronin, and Hult to consider “virtue,” “vice,” and “cash” incentives (i.e., three different types of self-benefiting incentives). The results provide managers with a better understanding of how they should promote and reward sustainable guest behavior. In addition to managerial implications, the present research also contributes to the academic literature on a growing phenomenon that has important implications for both business and society at large

Shopping, Gambling or Shambling? Penny Auctions

On penny auction websites, consumers participate in a game where the winner receives the opportunity to purchase a product for pennies on the dollar and discounts of over 90% are often advertised and recorded. Losers, on the other hand, may easily spend hundreds of dollars and walk away with nothing. For penny auction websites, profit margins over 300% on a single auction are not uncommon. Critics call penny auctions gambling. Proponents call penny auctions entertainment shopping. Either way, this emerging form of ecommerce represents a fascinating area for academic research

Fitting Restaurant Service Style to Brand Image for Greater Customer Satisfaction

Supported by academic researchers, the restaurant industry has devoted enormous effort to the task of conceptualizing and developing measures of “service quality,” 1 based on the reasonable proposition that restaurant guests’ satisfaction relies on quality of service. However, it has become clear to us that quality alone is not the full measure of how restaurant guests gauge or react to their servers’ actions. Consequently, in this CHR report, we measure the effects of “service style,” which we conceptualize as a manner of delivering guest service that is specifically identifiable on some dimension other than quality. We feel that this issue of service style has largely been overlooked, and we believe it’s important to assess the effectiveness of different service styles in a particular restaurant context

Clothing Color and Tipping: An Attempted Replication and Extension

An online, hypothetical, tipping-scenario experiment found that subjects tipped the servers less (not more) when those servers wore a red shirt than when they wore a white or black one and that female subjects perceived a waiter (but not a waitress) as less attractive when wearing a red shirt than when wearing a white or black shirt. These findings are opposite those in the existing literature and suggest that the earlier findings are less generalizable than previously believed and that the process underlying previous clothing color effects on tipping may not be precisely what the researchers thought it was. Possible explanations of the discrepant findings are discussed along with directions for future research and practical implications

Touch Versus Tech: When Technology Functions as a Barrier or a Benefit to Service Encounters

Interpersonal exchanges between customers and frontline service employees increasingly involve the use of technology, such as point-of-sale terminals, tablets, and kiosks. The present research draws on role and script theories to demonstrate that customer reactions to technology-infused service exchanges depend on the presence of employee rapport. When rapport is present during the exchange, the use of technology functions as an interpersonal barrier preventing the customer from responding in kind to employee rapport-building efforts, thereby decreasing service encounter evaluations. However, during service encounters in which employees are not engaging in rapport building, technology functions as an interpersonal barrier, enabling customers to retreat from the relatively unpleasant service interaction, thereby increasing service encounter evaluations. Two analyses using J.D. Power Guest Satisfaction Index data support the barrier and beneficial effects of technology use during service encounters with and without rapport, respectively. A follow-up experiment replicates this data pattern and identifies psychological discomfort as a key process that governs the effect. For managers, the results demonstrate the inherent incompatibility of initiatives designed to encourage employee–customer rapport with those that introduce technology into frontline service exchanges

The Warm Glow of Restaurant Checkout Charity

Checkout charity is a phenomenon whereby frontline employees (or self-service technologies) solicit charitable donations from customers during the payment process. Despite its growing ubiquity, little is known about this salient aspect of the service experience. The present research examines checkout charity in the context of fast-food restaurants and finds that, when customers donate, they experience a “warm glow” that mediates a relationship between donating and store repatronage. Study 1 utilizes three scenario-based experiments to explore the phenomenon across different charities and different participant populations using both self-selection and random assignment designs. Study 2 replicates with a field study. Study 3 examines national store–level sales data from a fast-food chain and finds that checkout fund-raising, as a percentage of sales, predicts store revenue—a finding consistent with results of Studies 1 and 2. Managers often infer, quite correctly, that many consumers do not like being asked to donate. Paradoxically, our results suggest this ostensibly negative experience can increase service repatronage. For academics, these results add to a growing body of literature refuting the notion that small prosocial acts affect behavior by altering an individual’s self-concept

Reversing the Green Backlash in Services: Credible Competitors Help Large Companies Go Green

Purpose – The purpose of this research is to first demonstrate a “green backlash” effect whereby evaluations of a large service organization decrease after the organization announces a new green practice and second, explore how the presence of green competitors might moderate this effect. Design/methodology/approach – The approach includes one exploratory in-depth interview study and three follow-up experiments. Findings – The results indicate that consumers perceive large companies to be lacking in credibility and that when a large service organization announces the adoption of a green practice, evaluations of that firm may actually decrease, i.e. a green backlash. Additionally, it is observed that the opposite is true when consumers are aware of a credibly green competitor. In these circumstances, large players are significantly worse off if they do not also adopt green practices. Initially it was hypothesized that the large company would need to imitate the credibly green competitor. However, the results suggest that a reversal of the backlash effect can occur even if the companies are engaged in very different green activities. Research limitations/implication – The context of the experiments is limited to the food service industry. Practical implications – The practical implication for large service organizations is that in markets where there is no green competitor, they should consider not promoting their green practices. However, these organizations need to have programs in place when a credible competitor inevitably arrives. The practical implication for environmentalists is the finding that large companies can be forced to go green simply via the existence of a small credibly green competitor. Social implications – The social implications of this research is that small green service providers are an important catalyst and necessary ingredient in the transition to a more sustainable service economy. Originality/value – This article is the first to empirically demonstrate a green backlash effect and identify conditions under which this effect might be reversed.Giebelhausen2_Reversing_the_green_backlash_in_services.pdf: 763 downloads, before Aug. 1, 2020

Web Advertising: Sexual Content on eBay

Trust is an essential ingredient for commercial success on the Web. “Shopping aggregator” websites such as eBay provide a mechanism for measuring trust in the vendor in the form of online shoppers' positive feedback ratings. This real-world experiment conducted on eBay demonstrates that although coupled with a very high trust rating, the inclusion of an explicitly sexual illustration in shopping aggregator gallery listings dramatically increases auction traffic but in most cases reduces the dollar amount of the winning auction bid, thereby lowering the return to the seller. Traffic increase but lower selling price resulted even for products that could arguably use a sexual appeal (although these products were targeted to women).Giebelhausen3_Web_advertising.pdf: 1179 downloads, before Aug. 1, 2020