Author(s)

Aihie Osarenkhoe^1*, Jotham Mbiito Byarugaba², Mabel Komunda Birungi², Abednego Feehi Okoe³, Az-Eddine Bennani⁴

¹Department of Business & Economic Studies, Faculty of Education & Economics, University of Gavle, Gavle, Sweden.
²Makerere University Business School, Kampala, Uganda.
³University of Professional Studies, Legon-Accra, Ghana.
⁴Department of Management & Strategy, Reims Management School, Reims Cedex, France.

Highlighted in this paper, is the extent to which a technological interface that enables customers to produce a service outcome, independent of direct service-employee involvement, is used by hotels of various categories in France. Extant literature has, to date, devoted more attention to the use of interpersonal buyer-seller interactions in the process of creating service outcomes. This paper aims to fill this void by contributing to existing knowledge on customer interactions with technology-based self-service delivery options. An exhaustive sample of 240 hotels located across 120 cities in France constituted the empirical setting. A one-way ANOVA that tested differences between means was used to assess the impact of hotel category (independent variable) on response time (dependent variable) among hotels in France. The findings show that there is significant dissimilarity in responsiveness across the hotel categories. A major implication of these findings for management is that the speed with which enquiries from current and potential customers are responded to is most likely a prelude to providing good quality technology-based buyer-seller interactions to create positive service outcomes using the Internet/e-mail. Major concepts in customer relationship management include the response speed of firms to questions and problems during the service encounter. The main contribution of this study is that it builds on existing literature on interpersonal and technological interfaces.

Hospitality Industry, Leisure and Pleasure Industry, Technology-Based Self-Service Encounter, Information and Communication Technology (ICT)

Osarenkhoe, A. , Byarugaba, J. , Birungi, M. , Okoe, A. and Bennani, A. (2014) Technology-Based Service Encounter—A Study of the Use of E-Mail as a Booking Tool in Hotels. Journal of Service Science and Management, 7, 419-429. doi: 10.4236/jssm.2014.76039.