The word hospitality conjures up images of warm, smiling welcomes.

“ I know my receptionists don’t smile. And I know that they should smile. I don’t need telling that. What I want is someone to tell me is how to get them to smile. “

-Anonymous

When companies try to control the behavior of service staff they are seeking to legitimate intervention into areas of worker’s lives usually considered to be the prerogative of individual decision making or to compromise aspects of individual character and personality.

Leidner, 1993

Service encounter› It is somewhat defined as a period

of time which a consumer or the customer directly interacts with service.

Eliminate the service encounter.

Levitt (1972) argued that rather than focusing on improving the ability of service staff to manage service encounters, we should concentrate on ways to eliminate or supplement them.

Routinize the service encounter

If one cannot eliminate personal service, one can so script and programme the service provider that he or she has little scope to mishandle the encounter.

Personalize the service encounter For customer service staff to be able to

respond to the needs of the individual customers, they need a range of skills and techniques to help them recognize customer needs, deal with upsets and difficult customers, motivate them to do the best for their company and help them handle their own stress and emotion.

Described as a way in which customer service workers are required to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward approval that produces the proper state of mind in others.

Surface acting involves "painting on" affective displays, or faking

Surface acting involves an employee's (presenting emotions on his or her "surface" without actually feeling them. The employee in this case puts on a facade as if the emotions are felt, like a “persona.”

Deep acting. It is a technique that most of us engage in when we psych ourselves up to feel and therefore display appropriate emotions.

It may involve trying to change the way we think about a situation so we may try to sympathize with the problems of someone whose behavior is somewhat irritating or angering us to try to make ourselves feel sorry for them.

Faking in good faith Work to display those emotions that you should

even if you don’t actually feel them.

Faking in bad faith Conforming to the organization’s rules and to

one’s own.

Gender Nationality

Hochschild discussed that service work is experienced differently by men and women doing the same job.› She claimed that women are increasingly

employed in subordinate service roles because they are thought to be better at providing the type of emotional labor that these roles require.› Customers treat women service workers

differently from men. Many customer service roles are viewed

as either male or female.

Without reflecting too much write down ten words that you would associate with the word waiter and ten words you would associate with the word waitress.

Hall (1993) defined waitering and waitressing as a totally different jobs using different scripts in different service settings.› Waiters dressed as butlers were expected to

provide professional service in upscale dinner houses while waitresses wearing sexy uniforms were expected to give family friendly service in family-style restaurants.

Uniforms serves a number of functions.They help customers identify members of

staff so they know who to approach and with what type of query.

They also help indicate to customers what the service encounter is going to be like.

They help in identifying the seniority of the staff.

They help employees identify with the organization and conform to organizational requirements.

Uniforms affect the way one acts out a role.

Uniforms may also be used to identify staff with a particular national costume.

The staff as well as the customers have different backgrounds and expectations.

Europeans have different cultural attitudes with Asians.

Staff may sometimes say no to customers in the following circumstances:

The customer requests something which would be against the organizations’ rule or outside the organization’s resources to provide.

A customer behaves in a way which upsets the other customers.

A customer behaves in a way which transgresses the rights of the member of the staff.

The old adage that “the customer is always right’’ is not accurate there are occasions when the customer is wrong.

Although saying no to customers is always difficult, skilled customer staff develop ways of controlling customers whilst giving the impression that they are in charge.

Thank you. God Bless!