Journal of Service Research

Recent developments in information technology imply that more service operations can now be transformed from expensive manual operations to low-cost automated self-service. Managers, however, are reluctant to replace personal service with self-service because of the potential negative consequence of self-service on social bonding and subsequent customer loyalty. In this article, the authors argue that the decision should be reframed as follows: “How can self-service be integrated with personal service?”

This article examines the impact of relationship type (true service relationship, pseudorelationship, and service encounter) on customers’ behavioral intentions in a context of service failures. Overall, the results from the two scenario-based experiments indicate that building a true service relationship with the customer might be a critical factor in ensuring customer loyalty with a failed recovery attempt. Moreover, the findings suggest that bonding the customer to the company might reduce customer resistance to premium prices.

Retailers selling very different types of merchandise are adopting the phrase retail theater in their public descriptions of their offers. The contribution of this article is an assessment of the use of the theater metaphor in retailing, especially with respect to the theatrical stage settings designed to create specific intended effects on audiences. Four forms of theater—theatrical realism, political realism, surrealism, and absurd theater—are used as examples. From the analysis of the theatrical performances, it is seen that the role of the audience is always considered explicitly; the role is different in different forms of theater, and writers and directors are clear as to the role that they would like audiences to adopt in a given performance. Such an approach can be translated into retailing. Examples are given of the intended customer (audience) effects, which can be created from retailing versions of the four theater styles.

Some recent studies have shown that culture influences how consumers perceive service quality. Others have shown the relationship between perceived service quality and behavioral intentions. In this article, the authors study how culture influences behavioral intentions toward services on the basis of services marketing and cross-cultural psychology literature. They tested and found that customers from cultures with lower individualism or higher uncertainty avoidance tend to have a higher intention to praise if they received superior service. On the other hand, the same groups tend not to switch, give negative word of mouth, or complain even if they received poor service quality. Customers from cultures with higher individualism or lower uncertainty avoidance tend to switch, engage in negative word of mouth, or complain if they received poor service quality. But they do not tend to praise when they received superior service. Managerial implications, contribution, and future research directions are also discussed.

This article describes an exploratory study, based on 259 interviews, examining whether it is meaningful to segment customers by the relative importance they place on the interpersonal and noninterpersonal aspects of service quality, and if so, whether the segments differ in their perceptions of overall service quality. The study shows that customers can have different priorities in terms of interpersonal and noninterpersonal quality, and this can influence their perceptions of service quality. For practitioners, this could provide a useful means of segmenting customers; for researchers, it raises an important issue in the interpretation of service quality research.

This article examines two major factors that affect the performance of an organization, that is, quality context and market orientation. Quality context comprises the practices and procedures within an organization that enhance the quality of the product and/or service. Market orientation is the process of effectively collecting, disseminating, and responding to information that will enhance the marketing function within the organization. The authors examine the relationships of these constructs with organizational performance within the hospital industry using structural equations modeling. The results confirm the multidimensional nature of all three constructs and show that both market orientation and quality context significantly affect organizational performance. However, whereas market orientation has a direct effect on organizational performance, quality context is only indirectly linked with organizational performance through its effect on market orientation. Implications of these results for the hospital industry and for future research in the area are offered.

The author responds to issues raised by Drolet and Morrison concerning their 2001 article assessing the use of multiple-item scales in service research. He critiques their arguments on both theoretical and practical grounds, putting forth a case supporting the use of these scales. His primary conclusions are (a) that using multiple-item scales in applied research does not necessarily have to be expensive, (b) that the amount of information contained in a particular item of a multiple-item scale goes beyond simply contributing to the scale’s reliability per se, and (c) that multiple-item scales often are needed in service research to measure complex constructs and ensure an appropriate level of measurement validity.

The authors respond to Grapentine’s comment. The authors agree with several of Grapentine’s points but have a few important points of disagreement. In particular, the authors disagree that the cost issue of using multi-item measures can be sidestepped and that high measurement reliability translates into high measurement validity.