Automation of frontline service encounters, or the replacement of frontline employees by technologies, is increasingly more common. This new service style, often called self- service, has attracted the attention of service providers who are looking to cut costs (Lin & Hsieh, 2007; Walker et al., 2002) and increase efficiency (Bitner et al., 2002; Curran et al., 2003; Dabholkar, 1996). On the other hand, a major disadvantage of self-service is that it puts the burden of service delivery on consumers (Lu et al., 2019). In other words, the introduction of self-service means a shift from consumers being served by frontline employees to their serving themselves by interacting with technologies. This means that consumers’ acceptance is key for self-service to be implemented successfully.

In recent years, the significance of small talk in institutional context has been receiving considerable attention in the field of sociolinguistics and communication studies. While scholars seem to agree on its social functions that facilitate the accomplishment of the institutional goal of the encounter by “oiling interpersonal wheels”, the wide range of interpersonal relationships enacted in small talk in institutional encounter has not been subject to rigorous research attention yet. By applying Conversation Analysis (CA), this study compares small talk in an on-campus coffee shop within two different interpersonal relationship groups: new customer-barista and regular customer-barista. Data were drawn from 35 video recordings of service encounters interaction involving both native and non-native English-speaking customers at a college-sponsored café. The findings show that small talk with a new customer strictly adhered to coffee-related topics and tended to be quickly curtailed by one or both interlocutors, as suggested by the alignment of their institutional roles of barista-customer. In contrast, small talk between a regular customer and a barista consisted of exchanges on a wide variety of topics. This finding suggests that the topic of conversation is a potential indicator of relationship through a shift of alignment to the interactional roles of ‘friend-friend’.

The experimental study investigates whether customers perceive a service robot as apparently more deep acting than surface acting and whether these perceptions differ for interactions with human service employees and humanoid service robots. Moreover, the role of gender within these service interactions is examined.

This study presents an in-depth analysis of talk between immigrant shopkeepers and customers in terms of how participants' frequent frame shifts were constructed and how they contributed to friendly interactions between the two groups. The concepts of Goffman's (1974, 1981) 'situational frame' and 'frame shift' were applied to describe the process in which the participants frequently changed their stances and alignments toward their interactions in the stores. The data collected in two Korean-owned retail stores were transcribed for tum-by-tum analysis. An in-depth analysis of talk in this study shows ample evidence that the participants dynamically and actively participated in changing the situational frames, which contributed greatly to building solidarity and rapport between the participants.

Globalization has led to a dramatic increase in intercultural service encounters between services providers and customers from diverse cultural backgrounds. This paper explores the causal relationship between service employees’ cultural intelligence and adaptive sales behavior in intercultural service encounters, and the mediating effect of cognitive and emotional empathy on this relationship. A quantitative survey methodology was utilized to collect data on 341 salespeople at duty-free shops located on Jeju Island, Korea. Data analysis was conducted using SPSS 18 and Amos 18. The results show that cultural intelligence has a significant impact on cognitive empathy, emotional empathy, and adaptive sales behavior. Cognitive empathy has a positive impact on adaptive sales behavior, whereas the relationship between emotional empathy and adaptive sales behavior is not significant. Additionally, cognitive empathy mediates the relationship of cultural intelligence and adaptive sales behavior. This study has useful managerial implications for employee selection, training, and development in service firms engaged in intercultural service encounters. This study extends prior research on intercultural service encounters by exploring the direct impact of cultural intelligence on intercultural adaptation and the mediating effect of empathy, suggesting the presence of a cognitive mechanism that plays a key role in the impact of cultural intelligence on adaptive sales behavior.

Purpose This research primarily assesses – interactive quality in the service encounters of Ethiopian Telecom from the customer and contact personnel perspectives. Research design, data, and methodology – After reviewing the literature on service encounters and interactive quality, two separate questionnaires and structured personal interviews were conducted to collect the opinions of 400 customers and 100 employees of Ethiopian Telecom. The researchers used convenience sampling; the responses, measured on a five-point Likert-type scale, were analyzed through chi-square tests conducted on SPSS 17.0. Results – Regarding the outcome expected by customers, encounter effectiveness is very low. Regarding accessibility and materiality, the corporation’s personnel are freely accessible, relatively well-dressed, and have access to sophisticated office equipment and physical facilities. Finally, with regard to agent satisfaction, the telecom’s contact employees are shown to gain little professional satisfaction from service encounters. Conclusion – The study clearly presents the areas in which interactive quality strongly affects both telecom customers and employees; this will help the corporation take corrective action. This is of utmost contemporary importance for both practitioners and researchers.