Intercultural Service Encounters by Piyush Sharma

Author:Piyush Sharma
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Adequate Service Level

Past research on service encounters shows the existence of different levels of customer expectations (Zeithaml et al. 1993). For example, desired service is the highest level of service that the customers hope to receive and it is a blend of what a customer believes the service ‘can be’ and ‘should be’. In contrast, adequate service is the lowest level of service that the customers are willing to accept, and hence, it is the lowest threshold of acceptable service . The difference between the desired and adequate service levels is known as the ‘Zone of Tolerance ’, and it represents the extent to which customers recognize and are willing to accept variability in the quality of service across multiple service encounters (Zeithaml et al. 1993). Desired service level is generally idiosyncratic and stable, and hence, it increases gradually as customers accumulate experience, whereas adequate service level may change from one situation to another more easily, subject to a wide variety of contextual factors (Zeithaml et al. 1993).

Most studies on the different levels of service expectations and the zone of tolerance focus on the customers’ perspective (e.g., Gwynne et al. 2000; Johnston 1995; Liljander and Strandvik 1993; Nadiri and Hussai 2005; Reimann et al. 2008; Teas and DeCarlo 2004; Yap and Sweeney 2007) and ignore the service employees’ point of view, despite the dyadic nature of most interpersonal service encounters. In this context, Sharma et al. (2009) argue that employees may not be able to deliver their best service at all times due to various constraints, and hence, they may only provide a service level within their own zone of tolerance (i.e., between desired and adequate service levels defined by them). They also suggest that the employees’ desired service level would be the highest level of service that they would ideally like to deliver and it may possibly match with the desired service level of the customers or could be a bit lower depending on the employee ’s experience level and job-related attitudes .

Similarly, employees’ adequate service level is likely to be the minimum level of service that they are willing to provide and a customer ’s adequate service level may generally lie within the employee ’s zone of tolerance , resulting in satisfactory service experience most of the times. However, if the employee ’s adequate service level is lower than the customer ’s adequate service level (i.e., falls below the customers’ zones of tolerance ), it would lead to service failure and customer dissatisfaction. In addition, even the customers may have an adequate service level lower than that of an employee sometime, especially in intercultural service encounters, because customers may not be confident of getting even a bare minimum level of service due to their lack of familiarity with culturally distant employees, as shown in past research (Donthu and Yoo 1998; Furrer et al. 2000; Laroche et al. 2005). In such a situation, customers would possibly experience satisfaction if the employees are able to exceed their lowest levels of

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