Examining the relationship between language divergence and word-of-mouth intentions

More than half the countries in the world are multilingual, and more than half the world’s consumers speak more than one language. Thus, bilingual consumers often receive services provided in a second or nonnative language. This article examines these consumers’ word-of-mouth intentions after a service provision in a second language. Two studies show that consumers served in a second language are less likely to spread positive word of mouth. The results also reveal that consumers served in a second language perceive the service provider as less responsive in general. Furthermore, the service provider’s perceived responsiveness appears far more important for determining positive word-of-mouth intentions than other factors, such as service reliability. This study therefore contributes to the fields of service and sociolinguistics, with important implications for managers as well.publisher: Elsevier articletitle: Examining the relationship between language divergence and word-of-mouth intentions journaltitle: Journal of Business Research articlelink: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2013.09.008 content_type: article copyright: Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.status: publishe

Speak my language if you want me to come back! Service language's impact on return intentions

Purpose: Given the importance of customer loyalty in services, the article addresses how customer loyalty is influenced by the language the service provider uses. Despite the importance of the interaction in service encounters, service research assumes that both customers and service providers share a common native language. This might not be the case on bilingual markets. Specifically, the paper tests whether bilinguals who are served in their second language are less likely to return to the service provider. Moreover, it examines the mediating role of perceived speech accommodation efforts, and the moderating roles of bilinguals’ perceived second language proficiency and emotional attachment to the native language. Design/method/approach: Study 1 and 2 tests the main hypothesis using a scenario-based experiment with adult consumers in two bilingual countries (Belgium, Finland) and in different settings (restaurant, telecom). Study 3 further elaborates on these findings using a retrospective survey of actual customer experiences in Belgium. Findings: Driven by perceptions of speech accommodation efforts and consistent throughout different services, countries and methods, customer return intentions sharply decrease when service providers in bilingual markets do no use the customer’s language. Moreover, this relationship is not dependent on consumers’ perceived second language proficiency, but rather upon their emotional attachment to their native language. Originality/value: This is the first study of bilingual customers’ reactions to being served in their second language, among bilingual customers from different countries. Given that more than half the countries in the world are multilingual, service providers need to take customers’ native language into account when serving bilingual customers

Speak my language if you want my money: the impact of service language on consumer tipping behavior

OBJECTIVES The impact of language in services has mainly been studied from a perspective of perceived importance of language use. To date, research has not investigated the impact of language differences on behavioral outcomes. In this paper, we focus on one specific outcome variable; and examine how the service provider’s language use may influence consumer tipping behaviour. Investigating tipping behavior is an interesting outcome variable as consumers rarely wish to pay more when being served (Lynn and McCall, 2000). In this paper, we present three studies investigating the impact of language differences between bilingual customers and service personnel on tipping behavior. We further test the mediating effect of speech accommodation, a process in which the service provider accommodates the customer by doing or showing efforts to use the customer’s language. METHODS The three studies on tipping behaviour include two experiments and one survey with adult bilingual customers from two different countries (Belgium, Finland). The effect of language use on tipping behaviour, and the mediating effects of speech accommodation, is established through the three studies, confirming the hypotheses. RESULTS The results show that the service provider’s language use has a large and significant effect on the consumer tipping behaviour. This effect can consistently be observed in all three studies across both countries, confirming the generalizability of the results. We further establish that the impact of language differences on tipping behaviour is fully mediated by speech accommodation employed by the service provider. CONCLUSIONS Consistent across different countries and different methodologies, we find that customers who are served in their second language are less willing to tip than customers who are served in their native language. Given that tipping behavior can be considered as a proxy for service quality perceptions (Lynn, 2001; Lynn and Sturman, 2010), our findings thus suggest that restaurant visitors who are served in their second language perceive the quality of the service as low. This is an important finding as prior research focused on whether customers find it important to be served in their native language (Holmqvist, 2011), but did not focus on behavioral outcomes of these language differences. Our research has important implications for waiters and waitresses active on bilingual markets. It appears that they are able to increase their income with tips if they accommodate to the restaurant visitor’s native language. This would require waiters and waitresses to learn or enhance the second language of the market. Restaurant owners might also offer language courses to waiters and waitresses in order to make them more fluent in the different languages of the market. Doing so might be beneficial, as waiters and waitresses who receive more tips have a higher job satisfaction, and are more committed to deliver good service

Service recovery's impact on customers next-in-line

Purpose - Previous research considers service recovery as a one-on-one interaction between a service provider and a complaining customer. However, customers frequently complain at the place where they receive the service, making an investigation of the impact of a service recovery on observing customers necessary. Using observational learning theory and attribution theory as theoretical anchors, this paper examines whether observing a service recovery influences the observing customers' satisfaction and repurchase intentions. In addition, this paper tests whether service quality perceptions mediate, and customers' locus of control attributions moderate these relationships. Design/methodology/approach - Study 1 tests the main hypothesis using a scenario-based experiment in two settings (restaurant, retail). Study 2 further elaborates on these findings using a scenario-based experiment in a hotel setting. Findings - The findings show that the negative consequences of a failed recovery extend beyond the complaining customers to observing customers, whereas the positive consequences of observing a satisfactory recovery do not influence the observing customer when compared to observing a failure-free service delivery. These relationships are driven by the service quality information customers extract from observing a service recovery. In addition, the results indicate that the negative spill-over effects are attenuated if the observing customer gets information about who caused the failure. Originality/value - From a theoretical point of view, this study contributes by outlining service recovery's different impacts on complaining and observing customers: whereas service recovery forms a critical for complaining customers, it only acts as a dissatisfier for observing customers. In addition, it is the first to test a potential explanation for why observing a service recovery leads to lower customer outcomes, and provides insights about how service providers might attenuate the negative spill-over effects of a failed recovery

The language backfire effect: do customers always prefer to be served in their strongest language?

Current research in service research and sociolinguistics proposes that customers who are served in their native language hold more favorable impressions of the service provider than customers served in their second language. This paper challenges that perspective. Two studies show that consumers served in their first language after initiating contact in a second language feel humiliated. The results show that consumers exhibit a backfire effect to the service provider’s language change, and this backfire effect is due to a perceived identity threat. Consumers who are served in their first language when trying to speak a second language assume the service provider doubts their language skills, causing perceived humiliation. As even minor variations in humiliation might have negative consequences for service providers, the findings carry important implications for both theory and practice

Consumers' Willingness to communicate in a second language : communicating in service settings

Purpose – The service management literature emphasizes the importance of communication, but language difficulties can make communicating in business settings more difficult. This paper addresses consumer willingness to communicate in a second language to identity the antecedents that drive consumer language preferences. Design/methodology/approach – The paper presents the findings of an empirical study in two multilingual countries with a total of 361 adult respondents. Findings – The findings show perceived control to be the strongest antecedent of consumer willingness to communicate in a second language, and identifies second language skills as an antecedent in countries with little political tensions related to language, while political considerations is a strong antecedent in countries where language use is political. Research limitations/implications – The study is limited to countries with more than one official language. While multilingual countries make up around 2/3 of the world’s population, future research could test whether the same antecedents are applicable in monolingual societies. Practical implications – The findings help managers to understand in which situations consumers may be willing to switch language, and in which situations it is important to serve consumers in more than one language. Originality/value – The paper is the first to draw upon both the service management literature and the sociolinguistic literature to develop and test a model to explain consumer language preferences.status: publishe

Spreading word of mouth when loving and hating the same object: The impact of attitude ambivalence on pre- and post-failure word of mouth

This paper presents four studies investigating the impact of attitudinal ambivalence - and different types of ambivalence based on the type of underlying conflicting reactions; manifest and anticipated ambivalence - on positive and negative word-of-mouth (WOM). Results of Study 1 and 2 indicate that manifest ambivalent respondents spread more negative and less positive WOM compared to anticipated ambivalent and univalent respondents. Study 3 and 4 show that the impact of a product failure in terms of spreading positive and negative WOM is larger for respondents holding univalent or anticipated ambivalent attitudes than for manifest ambivalent respondents

Hospital-physician relations : the relative importance of economic, relational and professional attributes to organizational attractiveness

Background: Belgian hospitals face a growing shortage of physicians and increasingly competitive market conditions. In this challenging environment hospitals are struggling to build effective hospital-physician relationships which are considered to be a critical determinant of organizational success. Methods: Employed physicians of a University hospital were surveyed. Organizational attributes were identified through the literature and two focus groups. Variables were measured using validated questionnaires. Descriptive analyses and linear regression were used to test the model and relative importance analyses were performed. Results: The selected attributes predict hospital attractiveness significantly (79.3%). The relative importance analysis revealed that hospital attractiveness is most strongly predicted by professional attributes (35.3%) and relational attributes (29.7%). In particular, professional development opportunities (18.8%), hospital prestige (16.5%), organizational support (17.2%) and leader support (9.3%) were found to be most important. Besides these non-economic aspects, the employed physicians indicated pay and financial benefits (7.4%) as a significant predictor of hospital attractiveness. Work-life balance and job security were not significantly related to hospital attractiveness. Conclusions: This study shows that initiatives aimed at strengthening physicians’ positive perceptions of professional and relational aspects of practicing medicine in hospitals, while assuring satisfactory financial conditions, may offer useful avenues for increasing the level of perceived hospital attractiveness. Overall, hospitals are advised to use a differentiated approach to increase their attractiveness to physicians

Prevalence and mechanisms of resistance to carbapenems in Enterobacteriaceae

Objectives: To determine the point prevalence of carbapenem-non-susceptible Enterobacteriaceae (CNSE) and carbapenemase-producing Enterobacteriaceae (CPE) isolates among hospitalized patients in Belgium. Methods: Twenty-four hospital-based laboratories prospectively collected 200 non-duplicated Enterobacteriaceae isolates from clinical specimens of hospitalized patients over a 2 month period. All isolates were screened locally for decreased susceptibility to carbapenem drugs using a disc diffusion method according to CLSI interpretative criteria. CNSE strains were referred centrally for confirmation of carbapenemase by phenotypic and molecular testing. Results: From February to April 2012, 158 of the 4564 screened Enterobacteriaceae isolates were categorized as non-susceptible to carbapenems, resulting in a point prevalence of CNSE of 3.5% (95% CI: 2.9%–4.2%; range per centre: 0.5%–8.5%). Of the 125 referred CNSE isolates, 11 Klebsiella pneumoniae isolates [OXA-48 (n=7), KPC type (n=3) and NDM type (n=1)], 1 OXA-48-positive Escherichia coli isolate and 1 KPC-positive Klebsiella oxytoca isolate were detected in eight hospitals. None of the 72 carbapenem-non-susceptible Enterobacter spp. isolates were confirmed as CPE. The minimal estimated point prevalence of CPE isolates was 0.28% (13/ 4564; 95% CI: 0.13%–0.44%) overall (range per centre: 0%–1.5%). Conclusions: Despite the overall low prevalence of CNSE found in this study, the detection of CPE isolates in one-third of the participating centres raises concerns and highly suggests the spread and establishment of CPE in Belgian hospitals