Stuart J Barnes
King’s College London

Abstract:
Experiences are a critical element in creating value for customers of service companies. In the tourism industry, employee-tourist encounters are particularly important as a lever for experience value creation. Based on experience economy theory and previous research, we develop and test scales for five types of customer-employee interaction: personalisation, flexibility, co-creation, emotions and knowledge gain/learning. The scales are tested in the context of hotels, attractions and tourist stores in Copenhagen. We further apply text analytics to identify the types of customer-employee interactions that are the most influential in improving hotel customers’ perceptions of service, value and overall satisfaction for a quarter of a million online reviews. Our result suggest that hotel customers are difficult to please; positive employee-customer interactions receive significant positive improvements in customer perceptions of satisfaction, values and service, but customers are extremely sensitive to any problems in employee-customer interactions. Different impacts of interaction types are further explored.

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Venue
Department of Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering
Building B26/B – Room 0.2 – ground floor
Via Lambruschini 4/B, Milano