The Role of Methods of Service Encounter and Surprise in Customer Delight and Customer Loyalty in Indonesian Supermarkets

Maudlin Klissa Dhiandra Putri
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Maudlin Klissa Dhiandra Putri: Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands

International Journal of Business and Administrative Studies, 2020, vol. 6, issue 1, 09-20

Abstract: Traditionally, service encounters in firms have been conducted through interactions between customers and employees. In this digital age, however, different industries have begun to adopt "Self-Service Technologies" (SSTs) in which customers are serviced by a machine rather than a human employee. This study hypothesized that customer delight, customer retention intent, and Word-of-Mouth (WOM) intent can all be driven by both SST use and surprise. The purpose of this study was thus to examine the role of SSTs and surprise on the three aforementioned dependent variables in an Indonesian supermarket setting. 189 respondents were selected as the convenience sample to represent the Indonesian population, and a between-subjects experiment was conducted. The results revealed that neither service encounter method nor surprise had a significant impact on the three dependent variables. Surprise may not necessarily induce delight, perhaps due to a lack of a solid explanation that followed it and differences in cultural perceptions of surprise. Moreover, it was predicted that rather than the SST use itself, customer responses are influenced by the awareness of other Indonesians towards SSTs.

Keywords: Surprise; SSTs; customer delight; customer retention intent; WOM intent (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:apa:ijbaas:2020:p:09-20

DOI: 10.20469/ijbas.6.10002-1

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