There\u27s a fly in my soup : the influence of service guarantees and personal requests on customer voice

Anecdotal evidence suggests that service guarantees and personal requests by service workers encourage customers to voice following failure. However, empirical support for these tactics in facilitating complaints to the organisation is limited. To address this deficiency, a 3 (guarantee treatment: none, unconditional or combined) x 2 (personal request to voice: yes or no) x 2 (failure severity: minor or major) full factorial, between subjects experiment was conducted in a restaurant context. Findings suggest that offering a service guarantee, regardless of whether it is unconditional or combined, can encourage voice. Severity of the failure was also found to be associated with voice. Surprisingly, however, a personal request to voice was not related to customers&rsquo; voice intentions. Implications of the findings are discussed.<br /

An evaluation of the Raukawa Health Services Kaumatua Mirimiri Programme

The Kaumatua Mirimiri Programme was funded as a Service to Improve Access project under a contract which ran from 1st September 2004 to 30th June 2005. Its aim was to provide a “culturally based treatment and recovery programme to restore the health and independence” of people aged 40 years and over (Pinnacle Group Ltd, 2004a, p.1). However, as the service specification in the contract made clear, the programme was not designed be exclusive: it has attracted younger as well as older people, non-Māori as well as Māori, and people seeking help for a wide range of ailments and pain

Autoethnnography: A reflexive tool for event festival managers

ETHNOGRAPHIC EVENTS Lisa M Hayes and Jan C Robertson Dept. Sport & Leisure Studies, University of Waikato AUTOETHNOGRAPHY A REFLEXIVE TOOL FOR EVENT/FESTIVAL MANAGERS Practice and Advocacy: Doing Ethnography on the Ground Abstract: High‐quality production is the everyday expectation of people seeking leisure experiences through sporting events and/or (performance) festivals. People participate in events because "celebration can be experienced individually, but is realised more profoundly in significant social settings" deLisle (2009, p.6). However it is not only the event itself that contributes to the experience, it is a combination of the event and the ancillary services together that provide a 'seamless' consumer experience. There are a many strategies that can be employed to evaluate an event's successes and/or identify areas for enhancement, such as surveying participants during and post event. This paper explores an additional strategy, using auto‐ethnography as a reflexive tool, to assess an event's effectiveness in meeting consumer expectations. Two event managers attended WOMAD, Taranaki 2010, as participants, to experience the event and ancillary services provided, to identify the impacts ancillary services had on the overall WOMAD experience. This paper will take the form of a conversation between the two event managers critiquing 'space',accommodation, parking, access, catering, children's opportunities, facilities, signage and event personnel. An audio‐visual display will accompany this presentation highlighting some of the 'critical' factors that we, as participants, identified influenced our perceptions of the event's success. Watch the video on YouTube: http://youtu.be/CbfBsuCP36

Sensory ethnography: Enhancing logistical event management planning

We argue that students learn through employment of multiple senses. When concepts are complex, understanding can be greatly enhanced if theory is ‘explained’ in conjunction with case studies, examples and experience. Ethnographic storying, especially the use of photographic, and video media are examples of sensory ethnography. With the development of social media, such as You Tube and Flicker, one can create, at minimal expense short clips that have the potential to be employed as educational tools that facilitate comprehension of, often complex theory and theoretical practices. This paper provides a series of Flicker clips that have been developed and applied in WINTEC’s graduate event management papers. The focus of these clips has been on Event Management Logistics: having the ‘right’ thing, in the ‘right’ place, at the ‘right’ time, to ensure positive/satisfactory consumer experience. We will discuss how we collected, edited, and compiled these clips. We will also share the students’ responses/reactions to these clips and their perceptions as to whether our stated intention: to facilitate comprehension of, often complex theory and theoretical practices has been achieved. Lisa Hayes - bio is found on the previous page Jan Robertson is a senior tutor at WINTEC in the Faculty of Business. A keen tramper, photographer, and advocate for host community consideration in the provision of local, regional and national events, Jan teachers on the Bachelor of Applied Management, specializing in the EventsManagement endorsed programme. Jan is an advocate of the adage – a picture tells a thousand words. She has been actively exploring ways through which her teaching is enhanced to provide relevant and meaningful interpretation of leisure and event management theory to students from diverse backgrounds with divergent event management career aspirations. With developments of social media technologies Jan has been exploring uses of Flicker, You Tube and other forms of photographic and video representation to create educational clips from a variety of NZ events, to employ with her classes. Watch the videos here: • http://youtu.be/fevvJNlorZg • http://youtu.be/yFLiVVy69yU • http://youtu.be/t3p7ZX9PPMA • http://youtu.be/NGS94lU6L5U • http://youtu.be/Rh3gXGM6Nlc • http://youtu.be/4FDYCVs4Tv

A novel romance : conceptualising emotional attachment as a barrier to adoption

The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) aims to understand consumers&rsquo; adoption of new technologies. Some 30 years after TAM was first proposed, it is still widely used today. This paper proposes an extended version of the TAM, with the primary addition to it being the construct of consumers&rsquo; emotional attachment to an existing product. The expanded TAM, Technology Acceptance Model with Emotional Attachment (TAME), is applied to the understudied area of e-book reader technology and its adoption by consumers who read for pleasure versus for academic purposes, as has been the focus of past research on e-book readers. The extended model considers consumers&rsquo; emotional attachment to paper books (pbooks) as a likely barrier to the take up of e-book reader technology.<br /