Interactions between Service Customers Managing On‐site Customer‐to‐Customer Interactions for Service Advantage

Citation

Baron, S. (2007), "Interactions between Service Customers Managing On‐site Customer‐to‐Customer Interactions for Service Advantage", Journal of Services Marketing, Vol. 21 No. 7, pp. 538-539. https://doi.org/10.1108/08876040710824898

I was in the position recently of having to choose a hotel for a conference for 100‐150 delegates, and was provided with promotional information on the medium to large hotels in the area. One of the hotels, according to the brochure and web site, looked perfect: it had meeting and syndicate rooms of just the right size, very modern looking bedrooms and decor after a recent refurbishment, and was offering extremely competitive prices. Before arranging a visit to the hotel, I checked, on the “Trip Advisor” web site, to see what previous guests had said about staying in the hotel. The first account, headed “What a hell hole. Avoid at all costs”, went on to describe how the hotel was full of young men on a stag night (bachelor party) running around naked in front of children of other guests, and that, at weekends, the hotel bar was full of prostitutes plying their trade. Based on 45 guest reviews, the mean overall rating was less than 2.5 out of 5. Needless to say, I did not bother to arrange the visit, and the hotel owners/managers, unknown to them, lost out on potential revenue of over $35,000.

The reason I tell this story is to confirm the importance that service providers should, and can place on managing customer‐to‐customer interactions (CCI): the thesis addressed so comprehensively and thought‐provokingly by Nicholls. Before discussing the book in more detail, I can develop the example above both to convey the focus of the book and to illustrate two of its basic premises. In my position, I was interacting online with guests who had interacted onsite, in the hotel, with other guests. It was the vision of the onsite interactions that persuaded me against making any further contact with the hotel. The book focuses on onsite CCI between unacquainted customers in service settings (although there may be lessons to be learnt with online CCI). The first premise is that, in many service situations, customer perceptions of service quality are strongly by CCI. (It should be noted the CCI were not the only negative features of the hotel listed in Trip Advisor by the customer. Inconsiderate employees and poor food were also mentioned, but it was the CCI that were expressed in upper case letters). The second premise is that service providers should engage in determining strategies for managing CCI. It was interesting to read one of the other guest accounts, which specified that the hotel employees were neither willing nor able to dissuade the prostitutes from entering the hotel bar.

The book has nine chapters. Chapters 1 and 2 set the scene with succinct summaries of current theories of service production, delivery and consumption, co‐creation of value, and customer participation in services. In Chapter 3, Nicholls introduces onsite CCI specifically and argues that CCI “are most clearly illuminated through the lens of relationship marketing and the concept of value creation”. In this chapter, the framework that is employed for describing and classifying CCI is introduced – that of Customer(s) A and Customer(s) B. The impact of CCI is seen from the perspective of Customer(s) A and is based on the behavior of Customer(s) B. Thus, in the hotel account above, Customer A was the person who wrote the review on Trip Advisor, and Customers B were the stag night revelers and the prostitutes. Here, it is emphasized that it is CCI between unacquainted customers (strangers) in service settings that is the focus of the book. This chapter is particularly useful in bringing the relatively neglected service encounter component, CCI, to the fore, through the elaboration of the incidence and influence of CCI in twenty‐first century services, and the identification of a continuum of services according to the likely extent of CCI. Chapter 4 captures the main, previous CCI research findings published in the services marketing literature, and chronicles the diverse research approaches to the topic. Chapters 5‐8 provide a detailed account of the methodology, findings, CCI classifications and managerial implications of a comprehensive study, undertaken by the author in Poland. Chapter 9 offers a summary and directions for further research.

I concentrate the remainder of this review on Chapters 6‐8, as they present ideas that complement existing, published CCI research. In Chapter 6, Nicholls derives a classification of CCI categories, based primarily on his study of 190 critical incidents of CCI recalled by Polish customers. The six main categories of CCI are labeled as time, space, verbal behavior, information, assistance and “non‐customer” activity. Each category is divided into sub‐categories, and examples from the critical incidents are provided as illustrations. For example, the space category refers to situations where CCI occur primarily in special or territorial contexts. A sub‐category is “use space”, defined to be “that specific area around the customer, beyond allocated space, that needs to be recognized as under his control or influence if he is to gain appropriate benefit from the service”. Examples of CCI in the sub‐category include Customer B disturbing Customer A's cinema visit by talking loudly during the film, or, indeed Customer B running naked in the hotel corridors. To my knowledge this is the first attempt to provide an exhaustive classification of CCI. The way it is presented, together with the illustrative examples, provide excellent food for thought for practitioners who may wish to seriously consider the types and forms of CCI that affect their businesses, and also for academics who seek frameworks to underpin future CCI research.

In Chapter 7, Nicholls provides some interesting facts about the distribution of CCI incidents, broken down into the six categories, across different service industry groupings, demonstrating, for example, how different the retail and transport sectors are in both frequencies and types of CCI. Much of the remainder of the chapter is concerned with the distribution of negative and positive CCI. The discussion in this review so far seems to be about negative CCI and how they can be controlled/eliminated. I should redress the balance with appositive onsite CCI example about the hotel I finally chose for the conference. A Trip Advisor account contained information that “the hotel is full of business types and couples and this helps to keep the atmosphere in line with the cool surroundings”, and that “on checking out the next morning [I] bumped into the entire England football team which just added to the wow factor of this great hotel”. In the service industry groupings (with the exception of retail), Nichols finds that the negative CCI are more likely to be recalled than the positive CCI.

Chapter 8, the longest in the book, is about marketing strategies that take a CCI‐based perspective. How can service management prevent negative CCI from occurring and/or foster positive CCI? Help, for managers, is offered first through models that give them the opportunity to assess the significance of CCI for their organizations. Then, a number of potential strategies – market segmentation, service design, employee training – are presented for managing CCI. Finally, specific operational tools and techniques for implementing a CCI‐based strategy are suggested. Here, it is clear to see the influence of the notion of customer compatibility management, introduced by Martin and Pranter (1989) in a paper acknowledged by Nicholls as being the catalyst for his own enjoyment research topic of CCI.

In summary, I welcome very much a book totally dedicated to interactions between service customers. It is long overdue, and is very timely in an era where customer co‐creation of value and service‐dominant logic of marketing are receiving so much attention. The book is meticulous in its coverage of research on the topic area, and written in an accessible way for both academics and practitioners. There are some very minor criticisms. First, reference is made, in various parts of the book, to the potentially different CCI behaviors and reactions of Polish customers (living in a post‐socialist country), compared to those of US and UK customers who have been studied in most of the previously published work on the topic. I would really have liked to have seen a whole chapter devoted to the historical context of service in Poland, and other, similar Central and Eastern European countries, rather than the discussion around such issues being dispersed throughout the book. Second, there was a slight feeling of PhD convention when I was reading the book. There were a number of references to “the current study”, and Chapter 5, on the justification of the Critical Incident Technique (CIT) method, was rather lengthy in the context of the objectives of the book. Given the frequency of use, and general acceptability of CIT by the services marketing community, it was probably not necessary to go to such lengths to convince the reader of its appropriateness.

I would strongly recommend that service providers read this book to examine their current (lack of) management of CCI, and to seriously consider future CCI strategies. It does affect customer perceptions of service quality and can impact on the bottom line as the example in the first paragraph demonstrates. I would equally strongly recommend that services marketing academics at least obtain a library copy of the book, and find ways of making the management of onsite CCI an integral part of their services marketing courses.

The book does suffer from having a very uninspiring cover. Do not judge this book by its cover!