Service Environment

The paper entitled "The Influence of Service Environments on Customer Emotion and Service Outcomes, Managing Service Quality: An International Journal” by Jiun‐Sheng Chris Lin and Haw‐Yi Liang, (2011) aims to develop and test a more comprehensive model that focuses on the relationship between the social environment (employee displayed emotion and customer climate) and the physical environment (ambient and design factors) and resulting customer emotion and service outcomes. Results show that both social and physical environments have a positive influence on customer emotion and satisfaction, which in turn affect behavioral intentions. The physical environment exhibited more influence on customer emotion and satisfaction than social environment.

(2008) entitled “The Impact of Other Customer Failure on Service Satisfaction” investigates how and why other‐customer misbehavior has a negative influence on customer satisfaction with the service firm. The study found several important findings. First, people consider another customer's failure to be the firm's responsibility when they perceive that the failure is under the firm's volitional control (i.e. controllability attribution). This controllability attribution leads to customer expectations of compensation for recovery from dissatisfaction. Second, stability attributions about other‐customer failures were not found to be significantly related to the firm's responsibility. Third, the severity of the other‐customer failure experience bears no relation to the customer's service recovery expectation, but it is negatively related to satisfaction. Finally, the customer's evaluation of service is not only affected by the other‐customer misbehavior, but also by how employees react to situations when other customers are unruly or potentially disruptive. Providing employees with the appropriate coping and problem‐solving skills for working with problem customers is a key issue for service providers. More importantly, employees should be trained to help the affected customers, to alleviate any bad feelings caused by the other‐customer's

Extant literature on social exchanges between customers within consumption environment is reviewed pertaining to the interrelationships between customer-to-customer interactions, atmospherics’ perception and waiting time evaluation. The insights from this work suggest that making interactions between customers more enjoyable may reduce waiting time perception. In contrast, if the customer-to-customer interaction is perceived as negative, this may increase the waiting time evaluation. Albeit conceptual and exploratory in nature, this paper is intended as a beginning for further empirical validation of the effect of customer-to-customer interaction on the waiting experience. Few studies have investigated explicitly the impact of customer-to-customer interactions on waiting time evaluation. This paper suggests that social exchanges that may occur in the queue may affect the customers waiting