Slaves, Servers, Superstars Flashcards
What is this thing we call service?
Service is often looked at through an operational lens in hospitality research, focusing on management and business issues. The representation of ‘service’ in this literature involves a complex ecology of concepts, including service quality and service satisfaction, service delivery, service encounters and service scripts. As service research enters a more mature phase amidst emerging theoretical discourse, a ‘fresh insight’ into the hospitality service phenomenon has been advocated in the literature. In a dynamic movement in contemporary service research, scholars have commenced research into service through a sociological lens, exploring service as human interaction and social exchange. This movement aims to better understand the elements of service, as it is clear the concept involves more than operational procedure and task-orientation. As human interaction, service involves components of communication and interaction in conjunction with the product and non-human elements of service. In the commercial hotel setting, service therefore has a specific vocabulary and discourse structure utilised by those involved with the phenomenon. This human dialogue and language may involve words that can be used to define hospitality service. This is the dialogue of the service construct: the language used in human-to-human exchanges in and about service. This is ‘service language’
Why is language important in service?
It is important to consider how word use influences people’s perception of something. The words used by people to describe service have major influence: both over how they understand the term and also over how others perceive it. This is also important during service encounters: language is a crucial and powerful element in human-to-human interaction. Although service takes place at an operational level, service in a hospitality setting is a dynamic and complex interactive process (Johns 1999; Svensson 2006; 2004), whereby economic exchange is played out against a background of social and interpersonal human interaction (Czepiel 1990).
The use of language as a means of verbal and linguistic communication has a pivotal role in the interactive service process (Haring & Mattsson 1999; Holmqvist 2009; Johns 1999; Larsen & Aske 1992). The core function of the hospitality ‘frontline’ employee is to engage and participate in the interactive service process with service receivers, with ‘service’ actively delivered within this interaction (Lee, Nam, Park & Lee 2006). Interestingly, Scanlan and McPhail (2000) suggest that customers desire a high intensity of human interaction and emotional involvement in the service interactions as a component of social bonding. Core to the interactive nature of service is the communicative process between customer and service provider, and thus the language used within communication (Holmqvist 2009).
How is language used in service?
The aptitude and attitude of employees, particularly the way they talk to customers, have a significant impact on the customer’s evaluation of service and, ultimately, on the customer’s satisfaction (Presbury, Fitzgerald & Chapman 2005). For this reason, the dialogue of service interactions in a commercial hospitality context act to mirror elements of the host–guest relationship of traditional hospitality, blurring the line between private domestic domain and commercial activities (Chebat & Kollias 2000; Lashley 2008). While commercial hospitality has been distinguished from genuine hospitality and hospitableness as a result of the underlying motive of profit generation (Telfer 2000), obligations to be hospitable inform the behavior of frontline operations in many sectors of the hospitality industry (Lashley 2008).
Service interactions are commonly controlled through
planned communication and organisational engineering of language to shape the discursive practices of employees (Katz 2001). Through the use of language and discursive practices, service organisations act to influence their employees’ values and beliefs about what constitutes ‘appropriate’, ‘acceptable’ or ‘good’ language behaviour in the service interaction (Katz 2001). In a hotel environment, this commonly involves ‘ritualizing’, ‘scripting’, or disseminating organisational values to create and sustain cultures that mirror organisational service goals (Johns 1999). Through scripting and styling rules, the speech of hospitality employees is specifically managed and ‘made up’ by employers to create standardised performance and ensure a specific service concept is offered (Cameron 2000). Service delivery has been characterised using the analogy of theatrical ‘performance’, whereby the service interaction is stage-managed with scripted dialogue and action, and the front of house service environment becomes the stage (Hemmington 2007). This has implications for frontline service employees: as the cast who provide the performance, employees are recruited, developed, and managed as ‘performers’ to deliver a certain role to an audience. In a commercial service environment, the spoken language is used in many ways during service interactions. The overall goal here is to achieve service delivery of tasks while creating ‘experience’ and a sense of ‘hospitality’. The table below indicates some of the major ways language is used within service. These are the roles of language, generated from a current PhD study using data from frontline service employees in five-star hotels.
Explanation – Process
To standardize
To ‘tick the box’
To supplement service deliver
Explanation – Strategy
For competitive difference
For reinforcing brand
Explanation – Engagement
For breaking down social barriers To make people comfortable To make people feel welcome To personalize the service provider To personalize the guest To make people laugh To simulate family and friends
Explanation – Performance
Explanation – Performance
To create theatre
To create authenticity
To create enlivenment
