Two essays on understanding customers' crowding experience in services

Abstract

It is fairly common to have the physical presence of other customers in most service situations. When the number of other customers or their physical proximity exceeds a customer’s acceptable threshold, the customer experiences the perception of crowding. Crowding can have significant influences on customers’ service experience and behaviors. How to maximize satisfying and/or minimize dissatisfying customer service encounters in a crowded setting represents a challenge for service managers. In this thesis, I explore the nature, antecedents, and consequences of customers’ crowding experience in services, as well as the underlying mechanisms and boundary conditions. This thesis consists of two essays. Essay One examines how customers’ crowding perceptions (service outcomes including satisfaction and perceived service quality) in a given high density setting can be alleviated (enhanced) by incidental similarity shared among customers as well as the mechanism underlies the effect (perceived in-group identification) and the boundary conditions (valence and importance of the incidental similarity). Essay Two investigates how customers’ evaluations, including attitudes, intentions, and choice, of anthropomorphized (versus non-anthropomorphized) self-service technologies vary between social and spatial crowding and the underlying mechanism of social withdrawal. Guided by social identity theory, Essay One adopts a novel perspective to investigate why and when customers’ crowding perceptions in a high density service setting can be alleviated by incidental similarity shared with other customers. Across four experimental studies with both student and nonstudent samples from Hong Kong and the United States, I show that either truly shared or artificially contrived incidental similarity consistently reduces customers’ crowding perceptions and improves customer satisfaction and perceived service quality in response to high customer density, through increased in-group identification with other customers. I further show that the effect of incidental similarity is conditional on its valence and importance; only positive or aspirational and important incidental similarity contributes to mitigate perceived crowding and improve customer satisfaction and perceived service quality in response to a high customer density setting. Building on the literature on crowding and anthropomorphism, the second essay makes a first effort to explore how different attributions of the causes of crowding (either to social or to spatial reasons) influence customers’ evaluations of anthropomorphized (vs. non-anthropomorphized) self-service technologies differently. Across four experimental studies with both student and nonstudent samples from Hong Kong and the United States, I show that customers in a social (vs. spatial) crowding service setting are more likely to prefer non-anthropomorphized (vs. anthropomorphized) self-service technologies and perceive the service quality more favorably when they are provided with non-anthropomorphized (vs. anthropomorphized) self-service technologies due to a social withdrawal tendency. This thesis enriches and extends the knowledge in the crowding literature, as well as research on interpersonal similarity and anthropomorphism. Findings derived from this thesis also offer useful suggestions on crowding management for service managers.