Other customers in a service encounter:
examining the effect in a restaurant setting
Namin Kim
College of Management and International Relations, Kyunghee University, Suwon, Korea, and
Moonkyu Lee
School of Business, Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to identify how the mere presence of other customers in a service encounter influences customers’ evaluations
of restaurant services.
Design/methodology/approach – Phenomenological interviews were used to reveal the dimensions of other customers and to develop hypotheses
on the moderating variables that influence the effect of other customers. A scenario-based experiment was used to test the hypotheses.
Findings – The analysis reveals that “other customers” is a multidimensional construct consisting of number, age, gender, appearance, attire, and
public behavior. Also, the importance of each dimension varies according to situational variables such as evaluation stages (pre- versus post-encounter
stages), the context of a visit (task- versus recreational-orientations), and the quality-related risks (high versus low).
Practical Implications – The study provides a rationale for service providers to strategically manage their customers. It also gives guidelines of how
customers should be “managed”.
Originality/value – The present study is meaningful in the sense that it is one of the first empirical studies which concentrated on the passive role
(mere presence) of other customers in a service encounter. The dimensions of other customers and the moderating variables revealed are expected to
stimulate further research in the area.
Keywords Other customers, Restaurants, Service encounter, Consumer behaviour, Perception, Service levels, Customer Satisfaction
Paper type Research paper
An executive summary for managers and executive
readers can be found at the end of this article.
Introduction
A consumer’s experience in a service encounter consists of
three visible components: contact personnel; inanimate
environment or physical surroundings; and other customers
(Bateson, 1985; Davies et al., 1999). Among them, the last
component “other customers” has received considerably less
research attention than the others, possibly because this
dimension is difficult for firms to control or approach
strategically. However, the extant research indicates that other
customers sharing a service environment do affect a customer’
behavior and attitude toward a service firm (Martin, 1996;
Martin and Pranter, 1989). Therefore, the construct deserves
more investigation.
The existing research on other customers sharing a service
environment, though limited, has been divided into two
streams (Tombs and McColl-Kennedy, 2003). The more
common research stream, referred to as customer-to-
customer interactions or observable oral participations,
concerns how interactions with other customers influence a
consumer (e.g. McGrath and Otnes, 1995; Moore et al., 2005;
Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2000). These interactions are
known to influence a customer’ loyalty to the firm, positive
word of mouth (Moore et al., 2005), and voluntary
performances (Rosenbaum and Massiah, 2007). The second
stream of research on other customers involves their passive
role. The researchers in this stream have argued that the
presence of other customers can affect a customer in a service
environment even without direct interactions. Customer
density or crowding (e.g. Eroglu and Machleit, 1990;
Hui and Bateson, 1991) and other customers’ public
behaviors (e.g. Grove and Fisk, 1997; Martin, 1996) are
some of the research topics in this stream. The indirect effects
of other customers have not drawn much research interest so
far, but the issue is worthy of greater investigation because,
even if the effect is weaker than that of direct interactions,
other customers are part of the experience in one way or
another virtually every time a customer enters an
establishment. For example, Grove and Fisk (1997) found
that 56.8 percent of the respondents had “an occasion when a
visit to a tourist attraction was significantly affected by the
presence of others.” This figure contrasts with the results of
Harris et al. (1995) in which only 11.63 percent among
1,101 subjects answered they engaged in direct customer-to-
customer interactions during the shopping.
The present study focuses on the passive effects of
other customers, or the mere presence of others who
share the same service environment in a restaurant
context. Restaurant services were chosen because they
are expected to capture the effects of other customers well
and are one of the largest and fastest-growing industries
(Andaleeb and Conway, 2006). Specifically, two issues will be
examined:
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/0887-6045.htm
Journal of Services Marketing
26/1 (2012) 27– 40
q Emerald Group Publishing Limited [ISSN 0887-6045]
[DOI 10.1108/08876041211199706]
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