Traditionally, service encounters in firms have been conducted through interactions between customers and employees. In this digital age, however, different industries have begun to adopt “Self-Service Technologies” (SSTs) in which customers are serviced by a machine rather than a human employee. This study hypothesized that customer delight, customer retention intent, and Word of-Mouth (WOM) intent could all be driven by both SST use and surprise. This study aimed to examine the role of SSTs and surprise on the three aforementioned dependent variables in an Indonesian supermarket setting. One hundred eighty-nine respondents were selected as the convenience sample to represent the Indonesian population, and a between-subjects experiment was conducted. The results revealed that neither service encounter method nor surprise significantly impacted the three dependent variables. Surprise may not necessarily induce delight, perhaps due to a lack of a solid explanation that followed it and differences in cultural perceptions of surprise. Moreover, it was predicted that rather than the SST use itself, customer responses are influenced by the awareness of other Indonesians towards SSTs. This study informed managers that though there is no best service encounter method to use, they can still build a successful marketing strategy by researching the needs of individual customers.

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Putri, M. K. D. (2020). The role of methods of service encounter and surprise in customer delight and customer loyalty in Indonesian supermarkets. International Journal of Business and Administrative Studies, 6(1), 9-20. doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.20469/ijbas.6.10002-1