How would cultural differences affect customer experience in Chinese restaurants in Finland?
Liu, Liu (2019)
Liu, Liu
2019
Kaikki oikeudet pidätetään
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-201904014101
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-201904014101
Tiivistelmä
Abstract
In recent years, customer experience has become crucial to business, especially in the restaurant industry. Therefore, understanding the nature of customer experience is vital for such service providers to gain valuable experience through their customer experience management practices. These include the customers’ perceptions and values are culturally affect the cultural difference.
According to literature and practices, this study empirically explores the cultural dimension of customer experience to determine the extent to which cultural difference would affect customer experience in the restaurant industry and how these impacts of cultural difference are reflected in service delivery processes. By adopting a case study structure and creating two reference groups (a Chinese group and a Finnish group), this research examined the main factors of customer experience, revealed how the two groups vary on the perceptions of customer experience, and finally formulated a conceptual framework to understand the role of cultural difference. 20 interviews (10 of the Chinese and 10 of Finns) were conducted to collect the primary data and thematic analysis methods were used.
The findings show that there are six main determinants of customer experience based on the answers from the respondents, namely, physical environment, service staff, food quality, value-for-money, authenticity and other clients. Besides this, Finns hold different perceptions of customer experience with the Chinese, where Finns focus more on physical environment and food quality to evaluate customer experience while the Chinese focus on service staff, value-for-money and other customers. Meanwhile, both Finns and the Chinese put great emphasis on the level of authenticity in assessing their overall customer experience. Finally, cultural differences also determine how the customer perceives the quality of customer experience through the presence of experience cues.
In recent years, customer experience has become crucial to business, especially in the restaurant industry. Therefore, understanding the nature of customer experience is vital for such service providers to gain valuable experience through their customer experience management practices. These include the customers’ perceptions and values are culturally affect the cultural difference.
According to literature and practices, this study empirically explores the cultural dimension of customer experience to determine the extent to which cultural difference would affect customer experience in the restaurant industry and how these impacts of cultural difference are reflected in service delivery processes. By adopting a case study structure and creating two reference groups (a Chinese group and a Finnish group), this research examined the main factors of customer experience, revealed how the two groups vary on the perceptions of customer experience, and finally formulated a conceptual framework to understand the role of cultural difference. 20 interviews (10 of the Chinese and 10 of Finns) were conducted to collect the primary data and thematic analysis methods were used.
The findings show that there are six main determinants of customer experience based on the answers from the respondents, namely, physical environment, service staff, food quality, value-for-money, authenticity and other clients. Besides this, Finns hold different perceptions of customer experience with the Chinese, where Finns focus more on physical environment and food quality to evaluate customer experience while the Chinese focus on service staff, value-for-money and other customers. Meanwhile, both Finns and the Chinese put great emphasis on the level of authenticity in assessing their overall customer experience. Finally, cultural differences also determine how the customer perceives the quality of customer experience through the presence of experience cues.