Synthesized Conceptual Theoretical Framework

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technology (e.g. virtual reality or intelligent machines) to catch customers‟ attention and influence their mental status. In other words, advanced technology would be considered as a stimulus to enable customers to stay in an exciting and memorable environment.

To sum up, good customer expectation management can lead service providers to gain in the experience economy. However, customer expectations are extremely difficult and complex for service providers to realize according to previous research.

How to correctly manage customer expectations is a critical issue during service experiences delivery. Hence, this study builds a conceptual theoretical framework of service experiences to enhance the feasibility and assurance of measuring customer expectations by service operations design including the environment, technology and frontline. Customers can stay in the atmospheric surroundings with pleasure emotions by using the warm light, the virtual reality technology, and the employee with a smile.

Accordingly, service providers can thoroughly implement customer expectation management based on such a good service operations design.

Put differently, this work attempts to create a strong foundation (i.e. service operations settings) to effectively and efficiently manage customer expectations.

Service providers can utilize proper service operation strategies to get the maximum values with their customers during service experiences delivery based on their capabilities, business goals, situations etc. Thus, this study is to build a systematical model for measuring customer expectations on the basis of service operations.

Meanwhile, it can increase the relevance between service experiences and service operations to support the standpoint of customer expectation management in this study.

3.3 Synthesized Conceptual Theoretical Framework

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After understanding the customer theory and emotion theory and analyzing service operations in detail, this study, then, proposes a conceptual theoretical framework of service experience. Service experience design is to promote highly positive emotions for customers by designing virtual or tangible services (Pullman and Gross, 2004). The objective of service experience design is to create functional, purposeful, engaging, compelling, and memorable experiences for customers (McLellan, 2000). Especially, service providers can deliver good services for customers with pleasant and memorable experiences through appropriate service experience design. In other words, customer experiences can be divided into several service segments, and then service design can be embedded in experience design.

Besides, Voss et al. (2008) proposed the architecture of the service delivery system to describe the service design concepts, which includes stageware, orgware, customerware, and linkware. Stageware focuses on the physical servicescape such as facilities layout or flows. Orgware represents the abilities of enterprises to manage and control the business strategies. Customerware pays attention to customer encounter points or touch points in a service delivery system. Linkware is the communication mechanisms that integrate or transfer service information with customers and enterprises (Roth and Menor, 2003). Consequently, the importance and necessity of service provider (i.e. orgware), customer (i.e. customerware), service operations (i.e. stageware), and communication platform (i.e. linkware) in a service delivery system is obviously addressed. Service providers need to have suitable arrangements of service operations and understand customer mental requirements based on existing capabilities in order to design and deliver appropriate service experiences to customers. Thus, this research builds a conceptual framework of designing customer service experiences by adopting above four critical

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As mentioned earlier, the purpose of service providers is to deliver high-quality service experiences to customers based on managing their expectations, emotions and service operations. This study proposes the conceptual framework of designing customer service experiences according to Voss et al. (2008) and service operations concepts (as mentioned earlier in Chapter 2). According to the architecture of service delivery system, this study tries to portray a conceptual theoretical framework of service experience (as depicted in Figure 3-4) to show the relationship among aforementioned key factors.

Figure 3-4 then demonstrates the conceptual theoretical framework of service experience. For service providers, the purpose is to deliver good exquisite service experiences to customers. Consequently, there are two considerations for service providers to take into account. One is service functions. Service functionalities, such as time saving, convenient or problems solving, are basically prerequisite to be provided customers with. The good nature of services can enable customers to tend to fell satisfying and raise the probability of repurchasing. Hence, there have been many previous articles discussing the nature of services. For example, as mentioned in Chapter 2, service quality is an important benchmark to evaluate services functionalities (Parasuraman et al. 1985). The other is customer mental part which includes customer expectation and emotion. Customer expectation is to represent what customers expect to obtain from service providers (Parasuraman et al., 1991; Pit et al., 1994; Zeithaml et al., 1993). Understanding the level of customer expectation can enable service providers to handily reach the customer franchise and customer satisfaction (Mattila and Enz, 2002). Hence, according to service providers‟

capabilities and business goals, they can actively influence customers‟ indigenous

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feelings (i.e. zone of tolerance) in order to accommodate the existing services by utilizing the determinants of customer expectation which can be realized by the expectation tactics(as defined in Definition 3-1). For example, when service providers have higher capabilities (e.g. capital, resources, or reputations), their strategy is to narrow the zone of tolerance in order to increase the entry threshold for competitors.

In contrast, the lower the capabilities service providers have, the wider the zone of tolerance is. Furthermore, customer emotion is also the important element for service providers to take into account. Customers would have the positive responses to proper services stimulus when they are in their positive pleasure emotional status. For example, customers with positive emotions (such as happiness, joy, excitement etc.) will spend more time and money in shopping surroundings (Donovan and Rossiter, 1982).

Accordingly, both customer expectation management and emotions creation concepts with service experience design are to enhance functions of service experiences. In other words, adopting specific psychological-functional interactive design to build a happy and comfortable atmosphere can result in customers with positive emotions and responses (Donovan and Rossiter, 1982). Service operations and specific expectation tactics have to be implemented by the environment, technology, and frontline designs in order to create a pleasant atmosphere and accomplish the functions of services (of certain service excellence attributes). Hence, since service experiences can be composed of several segments, high-quality service experiences need an integral approach to design the services and operation processes well.

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Figure 3 - 4 The conceptual theoretical framework of service experiences

Figure 3 - 5 The relationship between expectation theory and emotion theory Furthermore, Figure 3-5 shows how we use the expectation theory and the emotion theory. This study employs expectation theory to manage customer expectations via expectation tactics in order to realize what customers actually need (namely, adequate or desired expectations).

Definition 3-1: Expectation tactic: a service type¹ is mapped and related to a specific expectation determinant that aims to directly or indirectly influence the level of desired or adequate expectations.

Although the expectation theory provides an innovative grounding for service providers to manage customer expectations and deliver proper customers services, it cannot ensure that customers would have the wanted behaviors (e.g. the positive

1 For example, the advertisement service is a service type that can provide customers with the details of service information. Namely, the advertisement service can be mapped and related to an expectation determinant of Explicit Service Promises.

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approach response of purchasing goods or services). On the other hand, according to Mehrabian-Russell model (that is, the emotion theory), customers would have the positive responses to proper customers services stimulus when they are in their positive pleasure emotional status. Thus, it is fundamental for service providers to have good service operation design that can result in customer positive emotions. In other words, this study employs the emotion theory as a basic foundation to support customer expectation management for achieving the goal of customer satisfactions.

Furthermore, Haber (1958) addressed that the gap between customer perception and expectation is large that leads customers to have negative emotions. Hence, service providers deliver suitable service experiences to customers for matching their needs by managing customer expectation which can also result in customer positive emotions. Since service experiences, such as a lengthy journey, can be composed of several segments, excellent service experiences need an integral plan to design the services and operation processes well. Besides, combining the customer psychology with the design concept would create exquisite services and enable exquisite operation processes.