An Empirical Study on the Effects of Interpersonal Attraction in Customer-to-Customer Encounter Situations

Abstract

With the prosperity of service industries in past decades, service organizations devoted themselves to provide customers with better service experience. Numerous researches and reports have indicated that social interactions between customers and frontline employees play a critical role in determining customer satisfaction and long-term loyalty. In fact, many service encounters consist of more than one customer, but only a relatively small portion of studies has explored encounters between customers. Scholars have demonstrated that, like customer-employee encounters, customer-customer encounters also affect a customer’s overall service evaluation. However, practitioners and academicians still lack the knowledge on how to develop better customer-to-customer experience.