McAfee SOBA Study Reveals the Impact of Fair Treatment in Customer Service Encounters
Dec 22, 2007 - A recent McAfee SOBA study to be published in the Journal of Services Marketing provides answers to critical customer service questions. Do people form judgments of fair treatment during encounters with service providers? If so, do these perceptions of fairness have any impact on their assessment of the quality of the services they receive? William R. Nance, Jr., McAfee SOBA Department Chair, and Darin W. White, McAfee SOBA Director of Research, conducted a multi-country study with individuals from Central and Eastern Europe and the United States to answer these questions. In addition, Nance and White wanted to determine whether an individual’s age and national culture moderate these perceptions. According to William R. Nance, Jr: “While it has long been assumed that customer perceptions of fair treatment by service providers are related to service quality perceptions, there has been little research that explicitly examines this relationship.” Previous research has established that justice is an influential antecedent of behavior and attitudes in many different settings. From both empirical and theoretical standpoints, this groundbreaking study bridges the gap between the separate but related literature streams of service performance and procedural justice. The study found strong evidence to support the notion that fair treatment of customers affects service performance perceptions across both FLC position and culture. Darin W. White said: “The study has generated two action points which can easily be put into practice:” *Businesses need to understand that customers’ age has important implications on expectations for fair treatment during service delivery. We found that expectations for fair treatment and service quality increase with age which points to the need for more effective design and implementation of services targeted at customers within each of the various stages of the family lifecycle. *We found that national cultural factors impact expectations for both fairness and performance in services. Of particular interest is the unexpected finding that customers in Central and Eastern Europe had higher than anticipated expectations for interpersonal justice. Indeed, the CEE respondents’ expectations for a high level of interpersonal justice exceeded the expectations of customers in the U.S. In this regard, practitioners – especially those currently providing services in Western Europe and the U.S. but anticipating entry into the CEE Accession States – cannot assume that customers in the expanding CEE region will accept lower levels of the interpersonal interaction.
MCAFEE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION
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