مقاله سال ۲۰۱۷

Situations like the one above show how challenging it is for service providers to win customers back after a service failure. Such service encounters are “moments of truths” in which customers decide they will either continue doing business with the service providers or exit and deprive the service provider of all future revenues.

Given that employee/customer interactions are the “heart” of service provision (Holmqvist & Grönroos, 2012), surprisingly little is known about the role of language and ethnicity in service encounters (Rosenbaum & Montoya, 2007; Tombs & Rao Hill, 2014; Van Vaerenbergh & Holmqvist, 2014), especially when things go wrong. Service recovery research has made significant contributions in exploring factors leading to a transformation of customer perceptions of a failure to successful recovery. While the tangible aspects of such interactions after a service failure (what is communicated, what solution is offered, compensations etc.) have been studied extensively (e.g., Andreassen, 2000; Liao, 2007), the intangible verbal cues (language used, tenor) (Holmqvist & Grönroos, 2012) and nonverbal cues (displayed emotions and ethnicity) have not. In other words, would the service provider’s ethnicity and language used in communication lead the customer to rate the service recovery differently? Would such assessment differ based on whether the customer is a minority or a majority? The current research attempts to answers these questions.

Managers must understand the impact of language and ethnicity on the service experience if they want to apply appropriate recovery strategies when customers are disappointed, angry, and frustrated at service failures. In the opening scenario, orchestrating the appropriate language, ethnicity of service provider, and displayed emotions in the encounter between customers and service providers could be the difference between Catalina and Isabella’s reactions.