When Does the Service Provider’s Accent Matter? An Abstract

Abstract

With the difficulty in evaluating some types of services, peripheral cues within the servicescape or as part of the service encounter are used by consumers to help evaluate the service. This evaluation however, is exacerbated where the service exchange is not undertaken face to face or within the servicescape of the firm. Situations where the customer interacts with call centre representatives is such a case in point. In these cases, the customers’ perception of the service is solely based on the phone encounter. The continuing growth of outsourcing customer service call centers to low cost countries adds an additional layer to the evaluation difficulties of customers as service providers may speak with accent different to the customer’s accent. However even were firms do not outsource phone based customer service to ‘foreign’ countries the customer may still encounter an accent that is different to the standard spoken English of their home country. This is especially likely in countries, like Australia, with a large immigrant population. This study examines how three service-related extraneous factors, service criticality, service type and service-accent congruency, affect the extent to which service employees’ accents influence service evaluations. We report on three studies utilizing between-subject experimental design to uncover the boundary conditions when service providers’ accents are likely to affect service evaluations and when they do not. These studies are analyzed using MANCOVA, with the service provider’s accent and the boundary condition as the independent variables. The dependent variables are customer satisfaction and intention to purchase. The respondents’ acceptance of accent and their level of xenophobia were also measured and held as constants to avoid any bias due to underlying personal beliefs. The results show that customers hearing an Australian accent were more likely to be more satisfied with the service encounter than those hearing an Indian accent in an experiential service situation. However the effects on customer satisfaction due to an accented service employee were not seen in the credence service. Customers saw no differences due to service criticality in satisfaction when dealing with a British accented service provider. Likewise no differences in satisfaction were found between a Chinese accented and a British accented service provider when dealing with a service of low criticality, however accent did affect satisfaction in a high criticality situation. When examining the effects of congruency between the service provider’s accent and the service itself (e.g. Chinese accented employee in a Chinese language school) we found no differences in satisfaction for a congruent service but there was for an incongruent service. The same effects were found for the intention to purchase from a congruent/incongruent service.