How may I help you? behavior and impressions in hospitality service encounters

Abstract

In the service industry, customers often assess quality of service based on the behavior, perceived personality, and other attributes of the front line service employees they interact with. Interpersonal communication during these interactions is key to determine customer satisfaction and perceived service quality. We present a computational framework to automatically infer perceived performance and skill variables of employees interacting with customers in a hotel reception desk setting using nonverbal behavior, studying a dataset of 169 dyadic interactions involving students from a hospitality management school. We also study the connections between impressions of Big-5 personality traits, attractiveness, and performance of receptionists. In regression tasks, our automatic framework achieves R 2 = 0.30 for performance impressions using audio-visual nonverbal cues, compared to 0.35 using personality impressions, while attractiveness impressions had low predictive power. We also study the integration of nonverbal behavior and Big-5 personality impressions towards increasing regression performance (R 2 = 0.37).

The impact of internal communication on customers’ perception of revenue strategies

“…In general, first external marketing takes place, in which the company communicates with the guest before the guest comes into contact with an employee of the company, and at which point interactive marketing occurs. In the process of external communication, also called interactive marketing, customer satisfaction is positively influenced when the employee maintains eye-contact with the guest, smiles, nods, and speaks with a high energy level, as discussed by Muralidhar et al (2017). This is supported by Jung and Yoon (2011), who noted that there is a positive relationship between demonstrated non-verbal cues and a customer's satisfaction.…”

“…This is supported by Jung and Yoon (2011), who noted that there is a positive relationship between demonstrated non-verbal cues and a customer's satisfaction. Muralidhar et al (2017) state that non-verbal communication is proven to be an important element in forming first impressions.…”

“…Turning a satisfied customer into a loyal customer is, according to Xu et al (2017), linked to how an employee deals with their emotions as well as fostering a deep interpersonal contact between a customer and an employee. Especially in the service industry, the behaviour in terms of professional, social, and communication skills, and personality of front-line service employees are the elements upon which guests evaluate the service encounter and the impression left by the company (Muralidhar et al, 2017).…”

“…However, this begins with the external communication first started from the company to the customer in order to attract the customer. Then, interactive marketing can take place in which non-verbal communicating has a vital role, according to Muralidhar et al (2017). While this is difficult to establish when communicating with customers via phone or e-mail, the value of the communication plan becomes apparent.…”

Your Body Reveals Your Impressions about Others: A Study on Multimodal Impression Detection

“…profession) influence others' perception of trustworthiness, dominance and personality traits. There are other studies using verbal and non-verbal cues to predict service quality and hireability [38], [43], [44]. For example, Escalante et al [38] proposed a deep residual network, trained on a large dataset of short YouTube video blogs, for predicting personality impressions and whether persons are suitable for a job interview.…”