Frontline employees. Their role in the dining experience and the perspective of customers : Case study of Mount Sherpa restaurant

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UNIVERSITY OF EASTERN FINLAND Faculty of Social Sciences and Business Studies Department of Business

FRONTLINE EMPLOYEES

THEIR ROLE IN THE DINING EXPERIENCE AND THE PERSPECIVE OF CUSTOMERS

Case Study of Mount Sherpa restaurant

Master’s thesis, Service Management Hanh Chu (277179)

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15.05.2018 ABSTRACT

UNIVERSITY OF EASTERN FINLAND Faculty

Faculty of Social Sciences and Business

Department

Department of Business Author

Hanh Chu Title

Frontline employees. Their role in the dining experience and the perspective of customers. Case study of Mount Sherpa restaurant.

Main subject Service management

Level

Master’s thesis Date

15.05.2018 Number of pages 68

Abstract

The study looks into the contribution of frontline employees in the customer’s dining experience from the perspective of customers. The aim is to increase the understanding of the customer- employee relationship and their interactions during the service encounter. The thesis also examines the correlations between the frontline employee and other factors of the dining experience. It seeks to find out how important frontline employees are to customers and to what extend this factor coordinates with food and environment in the restaurant context.

While the influence of food and environment on the customer’s dining experience have been studied a lot, studies about the frontline employee factor in the restaurant context are quite rare.

Frontline employees have a good understanding of diners and are the ones who contact with diners most frequently. In addition, in the current literature, most of studies explore this topic from the perspective of employees, managers and service providers. However, customers are the final evaluators of their own experiences. Customers can give different but valuable insights into the provided services. It is needed to study the topic from the customer’s perspective.

This thesis uses qualitative approach, single case study. The research is conducted with semi- structured interviews, of which themes were created based on five dimensions of the DINESERV framework. Twelve interviews are done with customers of the case restaurant in Kuopio, Finland. The restaurant is a medium-scaled fine dining restaurant. Content analysis and thematizing, along with inductive reasoning are used to analyzed collected data.

The findings indicate that frontline employees are embedded in the service environment, and they have close connections with other factors of the dining experience. Based on the interviews, it is referred that frontline employees play the essential role in the customer’s dining experience.

Frontline employees can influence the feelings of diners through multiple interactions during service encounters. Service failures and cultural elements are noticed. The study proposes that managers would assist employees in improving their skills and serving style, and make better employee allocation during busy hours.

Key words

Frontline employee, customer experience, dining experience, service encounter

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1. Introduction

1.1. Background

Service experience is one of the most emerging topics in the tourism and leisure literature. Gentile, Spiller and Noci (2007) stated that experience is the main factor that contributes to the company’s success. Despite the fact that service experience in some hospitality sectors is scholarly noticeable, researchers cannot cover many areas of this huge topic. “Tourism is an amalgam of service industries” (Otto & Ritchie, 1996, p. 165), and what really matters is not just the technical or tangible element but more pleasure-oriented personal need (Chhetri, Arrowsmith & Jackson, 2004). Carù and Cova (2005) were also akin to this opinion by indicating that the product solely cannot satisfy customers when they need to be immersed in the thematic settings, instead of consuming a single service. Even when the service aims at an individual, it is affected by its environment and relationships with direct and indirect factors.

In recent years, service providers have paid attention on customer experience in service offerings or marketing strategies (Meyer & Schwager, 2007). As being stated by Pine and Gilmore (1998), the economy is at the fourth stage of its progression – the age of experiences, after the ages of commodities, products and services. In the same token, traditional marketing is no longer able to cope with new changes, thus calling for more observation on experiential marketing and its application in studies of customer service experience (Schmitt, 1999). Experience becomes the new research focus in both hospitality and non-hospitality sectors.

Understanding experience from the customer’s view provides industry managers with more knowledge to create, develop, and enhance their service offers. First of all, service experience is shaped, consumed and evaluated by customers who are rational and emotional decision makers (Addis & Holbrook, 2001; Holbrook, 2006). Many studies conceptualized customer experience or explored its influences on customer relationship (Meyer & Schwager, 2007; Verhoef et al., 2009;

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Palmer, 2010; Lemke, Clark & Wilson, 2011). Nevertheless, finding stimuli (Gentile, Spiller &

Noci, 2007) and influence factors of customer experience (Wall & Berry, 2007) are considered more practitioner-oriented. Secondly, good service experience delivery and design can help the hospitality service provider differentiate themselves among competitors (Walls et al., 2011). The product and the service are the augments for the experience.

Service experience is a complexly constructed concept (Knutson & Beck, 2004), which differs from sector to sector. People do not have the same opinion on the concept of service experience (Meyer & Schwager, 2007). There is an urgent need of more research on service experience for managerial applications in different service sectors (Otto & Ritchie, 1996). While experience in traveling, discovery and wellness receives a massive recognition in academic literature, studies about dining experience show up with limited number of articles, books and publication, partly because dining experience is referred more to food – a tangible element. However, it can be argued that food and dining experience appear in various forms of services in the hospitality industry, whether it is the main composition or augment of the whole experience. Chang, Kivela and Mak (2011) noted that gastronomy is attractive enough to pull tourists to the destination. Food is not simply used to respond to one of human’s basic needs. Food has symbolic, cultural and local meaning to tourists.

Although food is undeniably the most essential part (Sukalamakala & Boyce, 2007), the dining experience is a holistic experience that is consisted of and affected by many factors (Kwun & Oh, 2007). It is agreed by a number of researchers (Sukalamakala & Boyce, 2007; Tsai & Lu, 2012) that food, environment, and employee are three main factors in the customer’s dining experience.

While there have been many studies about the influences of food, environment and employee on service satisfaction and service quality (Kim, McCahon & Miller, 2003; Wall & Berry, 2007; Ha

& Jang, 2010), studies about the relationship between these elements and the customer’s dining experience remain limited in amount.

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This study calls attention to the role of frontline employees and their influences in the customer’s dining experience in the restaurant context. In specific, this study responds to some unanswered issues in previous research. Ha and Jang, in their study in 2010, stated that good or bad employee service has different effects on customers with low and high perception of restaurant atmospherics.

The study was conducted in the casual dining case in the U.S., and it is necessary to prove the result in other types of restaurant. After that, Ryu, Lee and Kim (2012) observed the connection between three factors (environment, food and service) and perceived value by customers. The authors did not mention customer dining experience directly but noted that it is necessary to have more studies about influence of service employees, along with atmosphere and food, on customer perception of the dining experience.

1.2. The case restaurant

Mount Sherpa is an exotic fine-dining restaurant located at the heart of Kuopio city, Finland. The restaurant was established in July 2013. Mount Sherpa has different daily menu and periodically changes the menu on the basis of seasons and popular holiday celebrations. The restaurant is in the top ten best restaurants in Kuopio and one of popular tourist attractions in the city (Kuopion ravintolat, 2018).

Mount Sherpa provides tasty, authentic Nepalese food as well as warm and cozy atmosphere with neat space and traditional decoration. The medium-sized restaurant is capable for 60 diners at once and is most suitable for customers in groups and families. The restaurant’s name presents the authenticity of Nepalese style because Sherpa is a Tibetic ethnic group in northeastern Nepal, which belongs to the Himalayan region. Therefore, the restaurant is a good choice as a case study for this research.

In addition, more restaurants in different styles have been opened in the city center of Kuopio. It is easy for customers to find an alternative choice if they want to have new experience. In fact,

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another Nepali restaurant – Mandalay was opened at Mount Sherpa’s former location. With only more than 100,000 citizens in Kuopio, there has been a rigorous competition in this small-sized market. Keeping old customers is as important as getting the new ones. Since Mount Sherpa was established in 2013 and is facing a tough competition with a number of new restaurants, it is a suitable restaurant to study the influence of frontline employees on the customer’s dining experience.

Mount Sherpa position themselves an upscale restaurant that pays high attention on service quality and customer relationship. They do not offer full buffet option during lunch hours like many restaurants in the same area. Instead, they creatively turned it to a semi-buffet option of which only the main course is ordered by customers. With a smaller number of customers, upscale restaurants allow customers to customize their dining experience with a higher level than casual restaurants (Noone 2008). Experience in upscale restaurants therefore is considered more complex, with higher financial and time risks for customers (Noone, 2008). On the contrary, services in upscale restaurants are more diverse and rich for the study of service experience.

1.3. Objectives and research questions

The aim of this thesis is to increase the understanding of the customer-employee relationship during the service encounter and the role of frontline employees in the dining experience. The phenomenon is studied from the customer’s perspective. There have been many studies of frontline employees that were investigated from the service provider’s view, but very few are taken from the customer’s view. The view of customer is important for managerial application because customers are the end consumers and they co-produce their own experience. It is also beneficial to find out the correlation between employee service and other dimensions of the customer dining experience.

The main question is:

- How do frontline employees influence the customer’s dining experience in a fine dining restaurant?

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Two sub-questions are:

1. What is the role of frontline employees in the customer’s dining experience?

2. How do frontline employees influence other factors of the customer’s dining experience?

1.4. Key concepts Customer experience

According to Gentile, Spiller and Noci (2007, p. 397), “the Customer Experience originates from a set of interactions between a customer and a product, a company, or part of its organization, which provoke a reaction (LaSalle and Britton, 2003; Shaw and Ivens, 2005). This experience is strictly personal and implies the customer’s involvement at different levels (rational, emotional, sensorial, physical and spiritual) (LaSalle and Britton, 2003; Schmitt, 1999)”.

Dining experience

The dining experience is the customer’s evaluation of the holistic experience of which main attributes are food, environment, and service (Canny, 2014). Before going to a restaurant,

“customers will have certain perceptions of the dining experience they are about to encounter”

(Sukalamakala & Boyce, 2007, p.11).

Frontline employee

Frontline employees are those who have direct contact (Singh, 2000), and frequent interactions with customers (Wang, Luo & Tai, 2017). Karatepe and Oludag (2007) defined frontline employees as workers in boundary-spanning positions. Frontline employees largely contribute to service delivery; they represent for the service provider and they are the essential factor of the company’s marketing and management strategies (Karatepe & Sokmen, 2006).

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Service encounter

Service encounter is created from the interactions between customers and frontline employees, servicescape and other actors (Lin & Mattila, 2010). Service encounter refers to the moment of truth that heavily influences customer evaluation, satisfaction and repurchase intention. Chandon, Leo and Philippe (1997) defined service encounter as the moment when customer has face-to-face interactions with the service. Service encounter shapes and generate emotions in customers (Pugh, 2001).

1.5. Structure

There are five main sections in this study. The introduction part provides readers with information about the topic, research purposes and research questions. Motivations and reasons of choosing the topic are mentioned. This part also provides a quick review of key concepts that are highlights of the topic. The second section goes deeper in the theoretical background of the topic with the aim of reviewing how the topic and its related matters were studied in previous research and framing the big picture of them. The next section presents the choice of methodology, collection of data and methods of data analysis. The “Findings” section shows the results of data transcribing and interpretation of the interview. The final section assesses the theoretical and practical contributions (or managerial implications) of the study as well as discusses the potentials for further studies.

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2. Customer experience

2.1. Customer service experience

After Pine and Gilmore's book: The Experience Economy (1998), the term customer experience has become popular in the marketing literature (Knutson & Beck, 2004; Gentile, Spiller & Noci, 2007; Kim et al., 2011). Product is just a mean to support customer experience (Schmitt, 1999).

The way how something is provided has become more important than what is provided (Meyer &

Schwager, 2007). Yet there is no consensus of the definition among academics. A number of scholar agreed that service experience is the result of subjective personal reactions and feelings that customers experience (Otto & Ritchie, 1996; Knutson & Beck, 2004; Meyer & Schwager, 2007; Walter, Edvardsson & Öström, 2010).

Verhoef and his colleges (2009) stated that customer experience is also shaped by multiple reciprocal actions among service factors. Likewise, Lemke, Clark and Wilson (2011) recognized the customer's individual responses to the service or service provider through various direct and indirect interactions as components of customer experience. “Experiences occur as a result of encountering, undergoing, or living through things” (Schmitt, 1999, p. 57). Customer experience is indistinctly constructed (Kim et al., 2011), internal, absorptive and immersed (Pine & Gilmore, 1998), multidimensional and multisensory (Chhetri, Arrowsmith & Jackson, 2004).

Looking back before the Experience Economy era, Maslow was one of the first persons made a study of experience. Maslow (1964) mentioned the experientially based concepts such as peak experience and plateau experience, of which peak experience is considered much more intense.

While peak experience lasts in a short time, plateau experience lingers in a longer time. Since then, academics have tried to understand the categorization and the structure of experience (Walls et al., 2011). Arnould and Price (1993) studied extraordinary experience through the long trip of river

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rafting. Otto and Ritchie (1996) referred to psychological experience that stimulates the intrinsic motivation. Schmitt (1999) supposed that brand experience is an essence of customer experience.

Gentile, Spiller and Noci (2007) touched on the concept of holistic experience, and acclaimed that experience is the whole process, not just a few memorable moments. Experience is much more complex than service settings or the appearance of employees alone (Knutson & Beck, 2010). In the hospitality and leisure literature in recent years, low experience is a noticeable new concept that is the consequence of the experience economy (Palmer, 2010). If there are cheap products, there are also cheap service and cheap experience for the large groups of end consumers.

There are several linguistic topics related to the customer experience. The word experience is ambiguous because it can be used as a verb (the progress) and a noun (the outcome) (Palmer, 2010;

Konu, 2016). Customer always get experience (an outcome) after buying the service and product whether the experience is not always a good one (Carbone & Haeckel, 1994). Schmitt (1999) shared a critical view on customer satisfaction. With the popularity of this concept, experience is treated like a noun, an outcome of a process while the word clearly alludes to a process in many definitions. Pine and Gilmore (1998) presumed that we often use the word service experience, but service and experience should not be mixed. If service is a set of intangible values, customers buy experience to have memories (Kim et al., 2011).

Regarding to another controversial issue, Konu (2016) argued that customer experience and consumer experience are often used as substitutes of each other, but actually should be treated as different terms. Customer experience is a wider concept because it also refers to B2B customers, not only individuals. Many researchers do not use the term consumer experience even though their discussion focuses on individual experiences (Konu, 2006). In this dissertation, Konu clearly differentiated various concepts of experience (see Fig. 1). Based on Carù and Cova's argument (2003), Konu emphasized that since consumer experience is just one of four typologies of consumption experience, not all consumption experience refers to the market.

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Figure 1. Diverse experience concept (Konu, 2016)

Nevertheless, quite a few studies provide varied opinions about consumer experience. Schmitt (1999) regarded consumption as a holistic experience. Verhoef et al. (2009) used the word customer experience but supposed that it is influenced by the situational and consumer moderators.

Verily, the consumer needs to "be there" with experience and each consumer has a unique experience on the same event (Knutson & Beck, 2004). It is the consumption experience, not the product solely creates value for customers (Holbrook, 2006; Walter, Edvardsson & Öström, 2010).

This is a mutual relationship because the customer's subjectivity shapes the consumption experience. (Addis & Holbrook, 2001).

“A consumer experience is the multidimensional takeaway impression or outcome” (Walls et al., 2011, p. 18). Walls and his co-authors mentioned several noticeable arguments on the consumer experience. Human interactions, physical experience environment, individual characteristics and situation factors are external factors that affect consumer experience, of that the company cannot control the last two components. An extra or ordinary consumer experience is both objective (cognitive) and subjective (emotive). An extra or ordinary experience depends on the type of experience that the customer is buying (Walls et al., 2011).

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Emotional reactions account for the most important part in the customer experience (Otto &

Ritchie, 1996). People have different emotional responses to the same experience, based on their social cognitive background (Chhetri, Arrowsmith & Jackson, 2004). Through the experience, customers seek fantasies, feelings and fun (Addis & Holbrook, 2001; Holbrook, 2006). A positive experience refers to the selfhood, self-improvement (Arnould & Price, 1993). However, customers are both rational and emotional (Schmitt, 1999). Customers are not only feelers but also thinkers and doers (Addis & Holbrook, 2001). They are involved in the experience in different aspects:

physical, rational, emotional, sensorial and spiritual (Gentile, Spiller & Noci, 2007). Their feeling solely therefore cannot create the whole experience.

Customers are multi-facet and sophisticated social actors (Bolton & Houlihan, 2005) who create the majority of the experience. As being stated by Namasivayam and Hinkin (2003), customers significantly design the characteristics of their own desired experience, and service employees are just assistants in the experience production. The customer has more control over the experience if the service is more personalized (Knutson & Beck, 2004). From another point of view, Schembri (2006) claimed that not all customers want to be active participants even though they are embedded in the making process and they are co-producer of their own service experience. Carù and Cova (2003) assumed that the customer-environment connection can be weak (absorption) or strong (immersion). Accordingly, customer participation is varying, from weak (passive) to strong (active).

In the same token, frontline personnel have a critical role in the customer experience (Beaujean, Davidson & Madge, 2006). They are in charge of the service interface (Liao & Chuang, 2004) and they are a part of the social environment (Verhoef et al., 2009). Besides, there are many factors of the customer experience that the service provider cannot predict or control (Verhoef et al., 2009).

Apart from main participants, unknown actors have impacts on the service interaction. Schmitt (1999) classified experience into five types that respond to what customers sense, feel, think, act and relate. Hence, environment, complexity, personalization, expectation and accessibility, all have effects on the experience (Knutson & Beck, 2004).

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Customer experience is a complex issue to many managers and practitioners because they want to see the tangible values of investment in customer experience development (Schmitt, 2010). But when the company takes customer experience seriously, they finally reach the so-called customer- oriented service. The development process, however, is challenging because of the customer's interactive and variable stimuli (Palmer, 2010). Meyer and Schwager (2007) acclaimed three stages of experience that follow the past, present and potential patterns. Even though experience is in the real time (Knutson & Beck, 2004), previous experience always affects current and future experience of the customer (Verhoef et al., 2009).

2.2. Service encounter, the moment of truth

Customer experience is created by unique consumption encounters (Walls et al., 2011). Service encounter is the experience at the contact point (Carù & Cova, 2003). It is uneven as the first encounter is vastly important for the whole experience (Palmer, 2010). Service encounters are critical moments of truth (Bitner, Brown & Meuter, 2000) through which customers develop their impression of the service provider. As a matter of fact, customers tend to imitate employees' expression without noticing it (Pugh, 2001). In this way, expressive emotions of frontline employees make changes in the customer's experience.

Service encounter is socially interactive because of the high level in customer-employee contact (Butcher, 2005). As being stated by Hui and Bateson (1991), service encounter is constituted from interpersonal interaction, in which the increased feeling of control affects customer service experience as well as people's psychological and emotional statement. Services encounters are highlighted for being random, flexible and intangible (Warhurst & Nickson, 2007) as well as being intimate and hands-on (Otto & Ritchie, 1996).

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Customer experience is shaped by multiple interactions between the customer and the service, the product, the frontline personnel, or the service provider (Verhoef et al., 2009). Service interactions are uncertain (Broderick, 1998) and heterogeneous in nature (Nickson, Warhurst & Dutton, 2005) due to different moments of truth (Mattila, 2008). This socially relevant activity (Bolton &

Houlihan, 2005; Sizoo et al., 2005) can lead to coordinated behaviors and hypnotic settings as outcomes (Gremler & Gwinner, 2000). Beaujean, Davidson and Madge (2006) described interactions of service encounters as the spark between frontline employees and customers. This interaction is also a part of the environment (Knutson & Beck, 2004). Service interaction are direct or indirect contacts (Lemke, Clark & Wilson, 2011), that depend on planned or unplanned encounters (Meyer & Schwager, 2007).

Customers seek to control the service encounter (Weatherly & Tansik, 1993). All the actors conflict over control because they have different targets, expectations, and benefits. Grove, Fisk

& Dorsch (1998) recognized the customer's essential role during the service encounter, due to the inseparability trait of service production. Even though customers are often considered passive, their behaviors have prompt effects on service encounter. Customers may act negatively if they feel the lack of control over the experience production (Namasivayam & Hinkin, 2003; Butcher, 2005), especially when they are new to the service.

Service encounters significantly connect with consumer emotions (Price, Arnould & Deibler, 1995). In the repetitive or long-running "boundary open" transactions, employees are actively involved in the relationship and share more feelings with customers (Arnould & Price, 1993).

Price, Arnould and Deibler (1995) insisted that customers intend to have emotional responses if the service encounter is longer and more repetitive. Their research showed that long intimate service encounters affect customers' immediate evaluation more than brief and formal ones, because both sides have created and developed a special bonding (Gremler & Gwinner, 2000) after every successful service episode. Intimacy in service encounters can be defined as the psychological proximity dimension of interactivity (Chandon, Leo & Philippe, 1997).

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2.3. The service performance

“Services are performances rather than objects” (Parasuraman, Zeithaml & Berry, 1985, p.42).

Several studies in the marketing literature studied the theatrical elements and dramaturgic aspects of service performance. Restaurant service has strong theatrical nature, because of repetitive face- to-face interactions and controlled/organized environment (Grove, Fisk & Dorsch). Frontline employees in the fast food service use scripted interactions to avoid the possible negative emotions of customers (Bolton & Houlihan, 2005; Nickson, Warhurst & Dutton, 2005). Schembri (2006) mentioned similarities of "method acting" in the motion picture industry and "deep acting" in service; both involve personal emotions. Even so, people can recognize the honesty of displayed emotions (Groth, Hennig-Thurau & Walsh, 2009), and frontline personnel cannot always control their acting.

The most notable findings in this topic came from Grove and Fisk's work (Grove & Fisk, 1992;

Grove, Fisk & Dorsch, 1998; Grove & Fisk, 2001). They found a number of similarities between actors and frontline employees as well as audience and consumers. According to Grove and Fisk (1992), actors' appearance, job skills, knowledge and attitudes can add tangible values to the audience's service experience; same things happen to frontline personnel and customers. In addition, actors or service personnel control atmospheric situations to deliver a good performance that should not be destroyed by unexpected damages or incidents. Through actor-audience relationship metaphor, Grove and Fisk (1992) illustrated the "back regions" of participants in a service and the "front regions" where they interact during an encounter. Before the performance, both actors and audience rehearse and image their parts in their own back regions, which are embedded in their life and service experience.

Broderick (1998) mentioned the role theory that focuses on interactive elements of the service performance. In her work, role script and dramaturgical aspects of encounters are put on the emphasis. Broderick (1998) found that the acceptance and choice of role of each participant leads to a positive encounter experience as well as a good service performance. On the contrary, when

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the customer is not satisfied with his or her role expectation, role discrepancies will happen and have negative effects on the whole experience. There are role conflicts between customers and service providers, and internal role conflicts among employees. During the service performance, one member has multiple roles in interactions with other members of different work groups and/or organizations (Singh, 2000). Regarding the service script issue, Harris, Harris and Barron (2003) claimed that all kinds of face-to-face services need to use scripts even though scripts have been criticized for being a mindless method.

According to Berry, Wall & Carbone (2006, p. 43), “functional, mechanic, and humanic clues play specific roles in creating the customer’s service experience”. Berry and his colleagues supposed that these three categories present for what customers want to see in a service performance:

calculative and emotional elements. Taking a restaurant as an example, the food, the environment, the staff are considered most important elements of the service. Yet how they respond to the components of quality, that already exist in the customer's perception is still questionable (Johns

& Howard, 1998).

Service performance is different from service effectiveness which is presumed to lead to customer satisfaction and loyalty (Liao & Chuang, 2004). Liao and Chuang (2004) explained the service performance of frontline personnel as the acts of supporting customers. Through various service cues, service staff deliver stimuli and emotions to customers (Harris, Harris & Barron, 2003).

2.4. Customer evaluation

According to Palmer (2010), Evaluation is one form of preference that shows the customer's favoritism towards the product or service. Evaluation directly results from comparison (Cadotte, Woodruff & Jenkins, 1987). In the service marketing literature, customer evaluation is often connected to two other popular concepts: customer satisfaction and service quality. There is no doubt that these two topics are unavoidable when academics discuss about customer experience.

Nevertheless, while service quality mainly concentrates in the company's process instead of the

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customer's (Lemke, Clark & Wilson, 2011), customer satisfaction is criticized of being product- oriented and lacking in the experiential connections with the customer (Schmitt, 2010).

When managers use only service quality to evaluate customer satisfaction, they measure functional components (Otto & Ritchie, 1996) instead of the whole experience. Likewise, customer satisfaction can be calculated in many ways, of which SERVQUAL (Parasuraman, Zeithaml &

Berry, 1985) is the most popular one, but its numbers do not show how the company can achieve it (Meyer & Schwager, 2007). In fact, hospitality service providers fail to deliver SERVQUAL elements because they are viewed by customers in a different way (Johns & Howard, 1998).

Customers and service employees do not share the same evaluation on the done service (Becker &

Wellins, 1990). Like the service personnel, customers have different needs (Butcher, 2005; Bolton

& Houlihan, 2005) and build their own scripts (Arnould & Price, 1993; Sizoo et al., 2005) before getting into the service transaction. Each customer segment values different component of the service performance (Grove, Fisk & Dorsch, 1998). Although Grove, Fisk and Dorsch (1998) could not prove any positive link between this difference and customers' demographic background, it is found that the "critics" customer group tends to pay more attention on frontline personnel than other factors in the service performance. In agreement with Grove and his research group, Bolton and Houlihan (2005) classified customers in three groups: sovereign customer, functional transactant, and moral agent, implying that investing equally in all customer segments is unnecessary.

Studies in marketing literature emphasized different positive impact factors on customer evaluation of service counters, such as knowledge and consistency (Namasivayam & Hinkin, 2003; Becker & Wellins, 1990). A number of studies agreed that authenticity and the extras are important factors for a positive service evaluation by the customer. Authenticity is the natural feelings of service employees and the service itself (Winsted, 1997), while the extras are special attention to customers (Mattila, 2000). According to Price, Arnould and Deibler (1995), customers find extras in service pleasing since they are given the feeling of receiving more value from the

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spent resources, money and time for instance. Spending extra time on listening to customers greatly contribute to customers' evaluation of the service encounter (Chandon, Leo & Philippe, 1997).

“The goal of humanistic studies was defined as the perception and knowledge of the good, the beautiful, and the true” (Maslow, 1964, p. 19). Service expectation and perception are therefore established before the service occurs, and both of them are involved in the customer's mental schemes (Addis & Holbrook, 2001). Chhetri, Arrowsmith & Jackson (2004) argued that perceptions are completely separate from the service setting. Organizational standards and guest orientation give customers a form of expectation before using the service (Susskind, Kacmar &

Borchgrevink, 2007). Familiarity of the service may connect to more positive judgement. Patterson and Mattila (2008) mentioned service familiarity concept as the self-construal that connects with the antecedents of customer perception and influences their evaluation.

In addition, service evaluation is influenced by the customer’s mood (Berry, Wall & Carbone, 2006), and it depends on the type of service (Groth, Hennig-Thurau & Walsh, 2009). It is the customer's feelings that really matter (Addis & Holbrook, 2001). Mattila (2000) found that for brief service encounters with less customer involvement, the evaluation is more mood-biased as well as largely mediated by temporary emotions. Accordingly, evaluation of extended services is more complicated but less biased compared to brief ones (Mattila, 2008).

Customers continuously look for cues and solace for the desired service (Namasivayam & Hinkin, 2003; Butcher, 2005). Some cues are verbal, while the others are nonverbal (Otto & Ritchie, 1996).

As specified by Berry, Wall and Carbone (2006), an experience clue is what a customer can see, smell, hear or taste. A service with extend contracts supplies customers with more cues to observe (Mattila, 2008). It is noticeable that "clues" (for customer evaluation) are not mixed with "cues"

(feeling, stimuli, choice) (Wall & Berry, 2007).

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Berry, Wall and Carbone (2006) proposed the relationship between perception and clues. While mechanic clues are connected to calculative perceptions of quality, mechanic and humanic clues relate to emotional perceptions of quality. Mechanic clues or tangible clues give the signals of good service, influencing customers in having a positive perception before using the service (Wall

& Berry, 2007). For example, "Well-presented" employee is one of those mechanic clues (Warhurst & Nickson, 2007). Yet it is not the tangible components, but experiential benefits such as hedonics play the most important role in the evaluation process (Otto & Ritchie, 1996).

Customer judgement of service encounter is influenced by culture (Mattila, 2000). Frontline personnel are often expected to be courteous, yet how much courtesy is hard to defined in different countries (Winsted, 1997). Winsted's study found that the Japanese customer pays attention to caring, courtesy, formality, promptness whilst the American customer values authenticity, control, friendliness, and personalization more. Depending on high- or low-context culture, customers focus on employee-customer interaction more or less (Mattila, 2000). Culture also has direct influences on norms, which connect closely with displayed emotions (Pugh, 2001). Failed services can be caused by misunderstanding among actors who do not share the same cultural background (Sizoo et al., 2004). Clearly, good service connects to different behaviors that correspond norms of each culture (Winsted, 1997). However, it is important to discern culture and country as they are not always the same term (Patterson & Mattila, 2008).

2.5. The dining experience

“Restaurant experiences are extended and hedonic in nature” (Noone et al, 2009, p. 381). The dining experience consists of the actual hedonic experience and other tangible components such as food and decoration (Otto & Ritchie, 1996). Mattila (2000) agreed with this opinion by claiming that experience in restaurant includes extended service encounters and involves various clues.

Restaurant service responds to one of human’s most basic needs: food (Johns & Howard, 1998).

However, even though functional clues (appearance, smell, taste of food) are undeniably important in the dining experience, they contribute to sensorial experience, only one of 5 types of an experience (Schmitt, 1999). Yüksel and Yüksel’s research (2003) also supported this statement by

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claiming that the dining experience consists of various tangible and intangible elements, not only food.

In the restaurant experience, all the episodes are blended; there is no clear separation between buying food (ordering), consuming (eating), and experiencing (staying there, interacting with the frontline staff) (Walter, Edvardsson & Öström, 2010). Dining experience is composed of many moments of truth during which restauranteurs have many chances to influence the whole experience of diners (Yüksel & Yüksel, 2003). The final moment of truth is when the customer, after completing the dining experience, decides to return or not return to the restaurant (Kivela, Inbakaran & Reece, 1999).

The dining experience is composed of hedonic and utilitarian consumption that correspond to fun- oriented and necessity-oriented consumption (Ryu, Han & Jang, 2010). While hedonic value creates the subjectivity and individualism of the dining experience, utilitarian value has strong impact on customer behavior and re-patronage intention. Ryu, Han and Jang (2010) supposed that hedonic and utilitarian values contribute to understanding of customer evaluation of the service.

In addition, some dining experiences produce more hedonic values than the others. This value proportion depends on the type of dining service. According to Addis and Holbrook (2001), the consumption phenomena changes over time based on consumers’ responses to the product features: utilitarian and hedonic products.

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Figure 2. The weights in consumption of products (Addis & Holbrook, 2001)

There has been a number of research about factors that have significant influences on the dining service. Most of studies agree on three main factors that are food, setting, service (Sulek &

Hensley, 2004), product quality, physical environment, performance (Kwun & Oh, 2007), cuisine, environment, employees (Sukalamakala & Boyce, 2007), food, environmental and employee concerns (Tsai & Lu, 2012). While most of studies shared the same conclusion about food as the most important factor, Kwun and Oh (2007) found that repeated customers pay more attention and value service more than the new ones. One of the reasons is that expectancy disconfirmation of service is moderate (not positive or negative) to repeated customers (Kivela, Inbakaran & Reece, 2000).

One of the popular tools to measure service quality and employee performance is DINESERV, introduced by Steven, Knutson and Patton in 1995. Since then, many academics have used DINESERV to study dining experience in their research. Kim, McCahon and Miller (2003) demonstrated that DINESERV dimensions responsively affect the customer’s holistic view of service quality. Kim, Ng and Kim (2009) studied about customer satisfaction and repurchase behaviors in an institutional restaurant. They found that all of five DINESERV dimensions (reliability, assurance, responsiveness, tangibles and empathy) are critical for customer satisfaction

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even though responsiveness and assurance present high overlap in results. Interestingly, responsiveness and empathy score under the customer’s expectation, meaning that the gaps between customer expectation and customer experience in these two dimensions are wider than the other three.

Before dining, customers always have certain perceptions that are influenced by their demographic background, food knowledge, preference and previous experience (Sukalamakala & Boyce, 2007).

These perceptions were built on the customer's product norm (food image) and the best brand norm (restaurant image) (Cadotte, Woodruff & Jenkins, 1987). Hence, customers have the perception of the dining experience and another perception of the restaurant at the same time (Kivela, Inbakaran

& Reece, 1999). According to Ryu, Han and Kim (2008), customers develop their own perspective of service providers based on the information about them. Each restaurant has its own image that segments the restaurant in the market. While the restauranteur tries to control this image, it is shaped by the customer's prior experience and information from mass media communication.

When customers have a positive image of the restaurant, they are more likely to satisfy with services provided.

Kivela, Inbakaran and Reece (1999) stated that perceptions lead to expectations; customer expectations are complex since there are more factors in their construct than the actual service performance. High expectation of atmospheric leads to high expectation of food and service, and creates certain emotions in customers before they use the service (Ha & Jang, 2010). Positive or negative expectancy disconfirmation causes the satisfaction or dissatisfaction of the consumed experience. Continuing with the long-running research from 1999, Kivela, Inbakaran and Reece (2000) found that customers have the first and last impression of the restaurant's physical attributes and food/service quality. One of their most important final conclusions is that dining satisfaction is more psychological than physical needs.

The customer's final evaluation is based on functional clues, humanic clues and mechanic clues in the restaurant (Wall & Berry, 2007). For instance, servicescape - one source of mechanic clues

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impacts the customer's experience (Lin & Mattila, 2010). Good food is proven by several researchers (Sulek & Hensley, 2004; Sukalamakala & Boyce, 2007) as the most important factor to customers when they use restaurant services. Humanic clues, in a highly interactive service like restaurant service, give a chance of customer delight and intensify the emotional connections with customers. Finally, the evaluation of the dining service is derived from the customer's holistic view (Kwun & Oh, 2007; Lin & Mattila, 2010). These complex characteristics requires the service manager to build a "whole configuration" of tangible and intangibles cues for the service.

Figure 3. Clue influences on customer perceptions (Berry, Wall & Carbone, 2006)

Regarding to humanic clues, Kivela, Inbakaran and Reece (2000) stated that frontline staff in restaurants are not only sellers, servers but mechandisers and customer consultants. Customers expect attention, personalization and warm treatment from employees (Sulek & Hensley, 2004). It is arguable that service excellence is created by frontline staff, but many employees are not aware of their important mediate role during service encounters. A well-planned marketing strategy can be a waste if frontline employees fail at the moment they interact with customers (Yüksel &

Yüksel, 2003).

The evaluation of service in restaurants is affected by customers in groups. A noticeable customer type in the service literature is customer unit which consists of two or more individuals. One customer unit can be a family, a group of friends, colleagues or even families. The consuming

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behavior of these multimember customer units is complex since each member has much life experience which is not particularly related to one specific service episode (Arantola-Hattab, 2013). Voima et al. (2011) indicated that a family as a customer is an ecosystem of many actors of which each actor may belong to different customer units and correlate with the co-creation of different value units. For example, an ethnic or a fine-dining restaurant is more attractive to adults than kids (Sukalamakala & Boyce, 2007). As a result, parents choose family-style restaurant for the whole family so that all the members can enjoy the experience.

In the opinion of Noone (2008), exhibited attitudes and behaviors of frontline personnel greatly influence customer evaluation of the dining experience. Satisfaction is created at the moment customers have direct interactions with employees. In other words, interaction component greatly contributes to customer satisfaction of the dining experience. Noone (2008) also claimed that the customer's enhanced perceived control creates hedonic elements and results in more positive evaluation of the employee's performance. For instance, frontline staff should let customers control the pace of the dining service. However, it is noticeable that employees need to be sensitive of customers' signals because the border between being attentive and being intrusive to customers is blurry.

Another important topic that relates to frontline employees in the restaurant is service fairness.

There have been many discussions of service fairness among hospitality academics, mostly about waiting time. No restauranteur wants their customers to wait for a long time because waiting time produces both psychological and monetary costs for customers (Yüksel & Yüksel, 2003).

Customers consider unfairness of waiting time being done on purpose, even if it is not (Sulek &

Hensley, 2004). In many cases, frontline personnel are blamed for this unfairness and then it negatively influences the whole experience. Moreover, when there are many customers in the restaurant, the service provider intends to fasten the pace. Yet fast-paced services may destroy the customer's pleasure in their dining experience (Noone et al., 2009). Noone and the research team introduced the inverted U-shape model and assumed that perceived pace by customers should be moderated in different stages of the service.

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Dining service is not the same in different types of restaurants. In other words, restaurant service is segment-specific; restaurants are classified in the full-service, quick-service, upscale, ethnic, or themed category, of which the last three types have small market niche (Kwun & Oh, 2007). The dining experience therefore depends on the restaurant type. In ethnic restaurants, customers want to experience a totally different culture and seek the cultural authenticity (Tsai & Lu, 2012).

Moreover, customer satisfaction differs in each restaurant type (Cadotte, Woodruff & Jenkins, 1987; Yüksel & Yüksel, 2003). In an affordable pizza restaurant, customer expectation of service is relatively low and customers care about price more (Johns & Howard, 1998). In contrast, customers have high expectation (Kwun & Oh, 2007) and value atmosphere factor in fine dining or full-service restaurant (Sulek & Hensley, 2004). As a consequence, casual dining restaurants have more satisfied customers than independent and niche restaurants (Young, Clark & McIntyre, 2007).

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3. Frontline employees

3.1. Frontline employees

In social sciences studies about boundary spanning, the importance of frontline workforce has been widely recognized as the key link (Becker & Wellins, 1990), center of management concern (Heskett & Schlesinger, 1994), essential factor in service customization (Bettencourt & Gwinner, 1996; Sahadev et al, 2017) or actual executor (Susskind, Kacmar & Borchgrevink, 2007; Wang, Luo & Tai, 2017) in service encounters. They arouse emotions in customers and add extra values to the core service (Pugh, 2001). Frontline employees deliver service to customer and communicate values with customers through actions (Larkin & Larkin, 1996). Warhurst and Nickson (2007) claimed that frontline employees is a part of the service; salaries paid for employees are costs of service production.

Sizoo et al. (2005) indicated that frontline employees spend most of their working time on service encounters. They greatly contribute to the intellectual and interactive aspects of experience (Pine

& Gilmore, 1998) as well as create the emotional climate for service interactions (Bolton &

Houlihan, 2005). Butcher (2005) reported that frontline employees can compensate the failed "core service" by making an "enjoyable interaction" with customers. Therefore, the majority of service quality determinants are directly connected with service personnel (Zeithaml, Berry &

Parasuraman, 1985).

Besides, service management researchers acknowledged apparent struggles of frontline employees in keeping good quality and productivity at the same time (Singh, 2000). Role conflict (Weatherly

& Tansik, 1993), collaboration with other colleagues (Susskind, Kacmar & Borchgrevink, 2007) and personalization (Bettencourt & Gwinner, 1996) are some of the difficulties. According to Ashforth and Humphrey (1993), since frontline service personnel act on behalf of the organization to customers in mostly face-to-face interactions, the behaviors of service agents are shaped by rules of displayed emotions. Thus, flight attendance, funeral directors, nurses, teachers are

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expected to display certain types of emotions or behave properly. Frontline employees need to not only show positive emotions (Pugh, 2001) even when customers are discourteous, but follow strict regulations of the service organization (Han, Bonn & Cho, 2015). Frontline employees sometimes are considered risks by customers when customers spend much time and money in the high-end services (Namasivayam & Hinkin, 2003).

Various studies have observed frontline employees from the perspectives of emotional state and intrinsic motivation (Beaujean, Davidson & Madge, 2006). As frontline employees have contacts with customers and cope with customers' requirements frequently, it is difficult for them to not integrate their own emotions at work (Chandon, Leo & Philippe, 1997). Clearly, their own emotions are not easy to be managed professionally. Service personnel deal with their emotions when they try to influence customers and follow the organizational display rules at the same time (Bolton & Houlihan, 2005).

Service customization is considered vital for the service provider’s competitiveness. Despite of technology support, many companies are fully or partly dependent on frontline employees in service customization which requires human intervention (Gwinner et al, 2015). Nevertheless, frontline employees often receive limited training, are underrated by managers (Karatepe &

Sokmen, 2006), and are often underpaid (Weatherly & Tansik, 1993). Frontline hotel employees often get emotional exhaustion and lose the work/life balance (Karatepe & Uludag, 2007), while attitudes and behaviors of restaurant servers are clearly affected by customers' civility (Han, Bonn

& Cho, 2015). It is paradoxical that managers often see frontline workforce as low-paid workforce who can be changed easily. Competent workers in the service industries are getting more scarce and difficult to retain (Rust et al., 1996).

3.2. Frontline employees and heterogeneity of experience

The concept of heterogeneity in service encounters has been discussed in the service literature from both aspects: service personnel and customer. On the one hand, frontline personnel

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differentiate customer types to decide the way of delivering service. Bettencourt & Gwinner (1996) proposed that each frontline employee builds his or her own customer classification scheme which is not solely based on their personal knowledge, training, past experiences, but their perceived desire for personalization. For example, travel agent will adjust their attitude, behavior and choose types of information to give customers by observing their style of clothing, speaking, and demographic attributes. In return, customers observe frontline staff to look for clues before using the service (Nickson, Warhurst & Dutton, 2005).

On the other hand, heterogeneity in service performance is also significantly influenced by customers. The diversity of humanic clues by frontline employees triggers different emotional responses of the customers (Berry, Wall & Carbone, 2006). Customers’ reactions of the same behavior are distinct and unexpected. Moreover, customers have different interpretation of the same clue (Walls et al., 2011). Butcher (2005) argued that service standards are subjective. While some customers are open to global standards in services, other customers remain stable across cultures (Mattila, 2000). Culture is one of the reasons for different "scripts" and role conflict of customers (Sizoo et al., 2004; Sizoo et al., 2005).

Being influenced by customers’ unique expectations, the frontline service personnel has the opportunity to tailor not only the services themselves, but also the way in which those services are delivered (Bettencourt & Gwinner, 1996). However, research of mass customization literature focuses on customized product/service for customers while ignoring possible discrepancies among employees (Gwinner et al, 2015) who do not share the same working experience, educational and cultural background, and possess different qualities.

3.3. The theoretical framework

As mentioned above, consumer experience is more specified than customer experience (Konu, 2006). In the leisure and hospitality context, customers are end consumers and individuals. Even though customers can come to the restaurant in groups (family, friends, colleagues), customer

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experience is still considered individualistic and subjective. In this study, consumer experience in the restaurant is termed the dining experience.

Based on the previous academic knowledge of the relationship between the customer and other factors in the service environment, the following theoretical framework illustrates the factors that influence the customer’s dining experience. Solid arrows show what are previously mentioned in the literature review part. For example, as mentioned in the section 2.1, the customer participates, designs and co-produces the values of the dining experience (Namasivayam & Hinkin, 2003;

Knutson & Beck, 2004: Bolton & Houlihan, 2005; Schembri, 2006). Dotted arrows present the main targets of this study: to investigate the influence of frontline employees on the customer’s dining experience, and the relationship of frontline employees with other factors that compose the dining experience.

Figure 4. Influencing factors of the customer’s dining experience

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As discussed in section 2.2, customers and frontline employees interact with each other at the moments of truth during service encounters. Section 3.3 refers to the heterogeneity of service created by frontline employees when they serve the customers. Also, different customers have different views, feelings and evaluations of the same service. In section 2.5, it is mentioned that most of academics in the service literature agree that three main elements of the dining experience are food, environment and employees. Sulek and Hensley (2004) mentioned service but connected this term with the service performance of frontline personnel. These three elements need to be well-arranged together to create a positive and holistic experience for the customer.

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4. Methodology

4.1. Research approach: case study

As being stated by Yin (1994), questions greatly influence the choice of research strategies. For that reason, case study is used as the research strategy for this study, because it is suitable for the answers of the questions “how” and “why” (Yin, 1994). This research strategy is also good for business studies because of its real-life and contemporary involvement of the phenomenon (Yin, 1999). With the same opinion, Eriksson and Kovalainen (2008) stated that case study can be utilized in studying complex, diverse phenomena with lived experience in specific business contexts. In a case study, the researcher transforms the object of study into an object of interpretation and understanding, thus defining the boundaries of the case.

Case study approach can be classified as explanatory, exploratory and descriptive type of research (Yin, 1994). Fisher and Ziviani (2004) described these three types by simple definitions. While descriptive case studies investigate interventions or process, explorative case studies work at situations when there more than one consequence. Explanatory cases studies explain the causal relationships of a phenomenon.

Eriksson and Kovalainen (2008) provided a detailed comparison of intensive case study and extensive case study. According to their book, some of the most recognizable features of an intensive case study are: one unique case, thick description, holistic and conceptualized characteristics, of which thick description shows how interpretation can make clear of multiple sides of the case, and conceptualization refers to the narrative of a good story. On the other hand, in an extensive case study, theoretical constructs are built by comparing a number of cases. Due to the dispersal, extensive case study has thin description of the cases.

Case studies are useful in studying complex or unique phenomena that could be difficult to observed by using quantitative methods. Using quantitative method is not the best choice to study

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the phenomenon that is changing constantly (Yin, 1999). In an agreement with this point of view, Otto and Ritchie (1996) claimed that quantitative approach barely can explore the rich, diverse and holistic features of studies of service experience, especially in the tourism industry. In the restaurant context, the quantitative approach that uses questionnaire as a tool only gives results of tangible components (Sulek & Hensley, 2004). Meanwhile, qualitative approach can study the individualistic and subjective aspects of an experience (Chhetri, Arrowsmith & Jackson, 2004).

It is observable that the real life, personal attributes of case study approach has been questioned because of its lack of scientific accuracy (Eriksson & Kovalainen, 2008). Fisher and Ziviani (2004) mentioned that case analysis has been criticized as the researcher tend to look for data to support the background theory. Case study therefore may provide biased information which is easily navigated by opinions of the researcher.

On the other hand, case study approach has been recognized by its possession of unique advantages compared to other methods. In specific, case studies can collect data from multiple sources by using methodological triangulation (Yin, 1999). Both qualitative and quantitative approaches can be used in the same case study. Beside many types of interviews, which are often used to collect data, digital material and questionnaire are considered important sources of empirical data (Eriksson & Kovalainen, 2008). In addition, Eriksson and Kovalainen (2008) supposed that case study is flexible enough to allow the researcher to shift the focus while collecting and analyzing data.

Interview is a popular qualitative data collection for case studies, especially in consumer experience research in hospitality and tourism (Walls et al., 2011). Walls and his team mentioned a number of studies that chose interview as a research instrument, such as studies conducted by Harris et al. (2003), Charters and Pettigrew (2005). Researchers can used in-depth interview, fully- structured interview or semi-structured interview. They can conduct direct interviews with

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individuals and focus groups or telephone interviews. Some studies used repertory grid that is seen highly valuable for management research (Lemke, Clark & Wilson, 2011).

4.2. Semi-structured interview

Figure 5. Five Dimensions of DINESERV (Kim, McCahon & Miller, 2003)

The themes of interviews are built on five dimensions of DINESERV, with the explanation for each factor from Kim, McCahon and Miller (2003). DINESERV is tailored from SERVQUAL to be more suitable for restaurant service sector. DINESERV is a simple and easy to use instrument (Kim, Ng & Kim, 2009). Originally, this instrument is used for questionnaire for the holistic service quality, but in this study, the five dimensions are modified as themes of semi-structured interviews. Besides, the interviews do not aim at service quality, but use those five dimensions in order to have a closer view of customer experience at the point when they interact with frontline employees.

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Figure 6. Themes for semi-structured interviews

It is necessary to notice that the list of questions is built to explore not the five dimensions of the dining experience solely, but connections of those dimensions with the employee factor during service encounters. For example, tangibles include food, decoration or staff’s dress code. This study will investigate tangible factors in the connections with frontline employees under the perspective of customers.

4.3. Primary data collection

Data was collected through semi-structured interviews with customers about their dining experience in the case restaurant.

This study uses semi-structured interview that consists of both general and elicit predetermined questions. Using semi-structured interview supports the interviewer with solid academic knowledge but at the same time creates enough flexibility for answers. The order of questions is flexibly changed depending on the interviewee. During each interview, questions can be rephrased and explained in different ways. Plus, general questions are used at the beginning of the interview

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so that interviewees could provide a more comprehensive, unbiased and unexpected view of their own dining experience.

A printed note about the interview was given by the receptionist of Mount Sherpa to each customer when they come and eat in the restaurant. Another notification was posted on the restaurant’s Facebook page. 30 customers responded to the invitation but only 12 interviews were conducted successfully. The interviews were done face-to-face during the last two weeks of January and were recorded. Not all the questions were asked in order. Some questions were occasionally omitted if they were not appropriate for interviewees and some questions were added by the interviewer to get more detailed information from interviewees.

Interview no. Age Gender

(F/M) Occupation Times of eating

at Mount Sherpa Last time visit

Interviewee 1 27 F Cleaner 10+ 2 weeks

Interviewee 2 40 M Unemployed 2 1 year

Interviewee 3 59 M Teacher 4 or 5 1 year

Interviewee 4 24 F Waitress 6 or 7 1 year

Interviewee 5 30 F PhD 1 3 months

Interviewee 6 57 F Cafeteria Owner 10+ 1 month

Interviewee 7 38 F Unemployed 10+ 1 month

Interviewee 8 35 M Car Salesman 1 6 months

Interviewee 9 39 F Office Work 10+ 1 month

Interviewee 10 25 F Student/Cleaner 1 3 months

Interviewee 11 40 F Student 10+ 1 month

Interviewee 12 24 M Student/Cleaner 3 6 months

Table 1. Information of interviewers

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It is important to notice that the interviewer used to work as a frontline employee in the restaurant so that this working experience may influence the process of data collection and data interpretation (Eriksson & Kovalainen, 2008). The interviewer reviewed carefully about the related concepts of the main topic in previous literature. All the interviews were done in English.

A test interview was conducted twice with volunteers before the actual interviews and an interview guide for interviewees was created after that. Before being interviewed, interviewees were informed that their personal information will remain confidential. Questions for the interview can be divided in three parts. Questions in part one are for interviewees’ profile information. The goal of the next part is to have a general view of interviewees about their dining experience in Mount Sherpa. Questions in the last part investigates a more diverse and detailed view of frontline employees in the customer’s dining experience. Time spent on each interview was varied, from twelve minutes to thirty minutes for each.

Interview no. Code Interview Location Interview Duration (mins)

Customer 1 C1 Interviewee’s home 00:15:37

Customer 2 C2 Cafeteria 00:16:46

Customer 4 C4 Campus 00:20:27

Customer 10 C10 Interviewer’s home 00:14:13

Table 2. Details of interviews

Frontline employees. Their role in the dining experience and the perspective of customers : Case study of Mount Sherpa restaurant