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This study aims to examine the interaction effects of chatbots’ language style and customers’ decision-making journey stage on customer’s service encounter satisfaction and the mediating role of customer perception of emotional support and informational support using the construal level theory and social support theory as conceptual frameworks.

This study used a scenario-based experiment with a 2 (chatbot’s language style: abstract language vs concrete language) × 2 (decision-making journey stage: informational stage vs transactional stage) between-subjects design.

Findings show that during the informational stage, chatbots that use abstract language style exert a strong influence on service encounter satisfaction through emotional support. During the transactional stage, chatbots that use concrete language style exert a strong impact on service encounter satisfaction through informational support.

Findings provide some suggestions for improving customer–chatbot interaction quality during online service encounters.

This study offers a novel perspective on customer interaction experience with chatbots by investigating the chatbot’s language styles at different decision-making journey stages.

This study investigated the moderating effect of organizational knowledge management performance on the sharing and use of information encountered by serendipity within the organization.

The authors surveyed 274 medical librarians from the top 100 medical schools.

Individual information encountering predicted information encountering at work, which, in turn, predicted organizational sharing of encountered information. When the propensity to encounter information was high, then organizational knowledge management performance moderated the effect between organizational encountering and organizational sharing of information. Encountered information at work was only present when high organizational knowledge management performance was in place.

This finding helps information behavior researchers discover the transfer of behaviors from everyday life to organizational environments.

It shows the need for greater support for information encounterers at work and the role of knowledge management, which may enhance their contribution to the organizational objectives.

Information encountering involves finding information by chance. Studies on information encountering have not focused on work settings and if the individual propensity to encounter information translates to organizational settings. Also, the relationship between information encountering and organizational knowledge management has not been studied so far.

Using the analogy of “If you build it, they will come” from the movie Field of Dreams, this study aims to draw on relational signaling and commitment–trust theories to examine the role of different types of trust (cognitive, affective and relational) in the relationship between relational-encounter quality and customer loyalty to service employees and to the organization in the case of an integrated casino resort. The study confirms that building it (trust), they (customers) will come to the casino exhibited in their loyalty to casino hosts and their affiliated casinos.

The study was conducted with very important person (VIP) customers who have a designated VIP host to provide them with personal services at an integrated casino resort in Macau. The questionnaire was distributed to the respondents by VIP hosts using WeChat and Tencent QQ.

The study shows that different types of trust (cognitive, affective and relational) play a significant mediation role in the relationship between relational-encounter quality and the customers’ loyalty to the hosts and their affiliated casinos.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to investigate the roles of different types of trust (cognitive, affective and relational) in the relational encounter between casino hosts and VIP customers and provides insights into the link between service employees and their firm through the nurturing of the service encounter with the firm’s key accounts.

In this study, 12 potential wake vortex encounters that were reported at a major European airport have been investigated. Because almost all encounters occurred in ground proximity, most pilots conducted a go-around. The primary purpose of this study is to discriminate between incidents caused by wake vortices or rather by effects like wind shear or turbulence. Detailed knowledge of real-world encounter scenarios and identification of worst-case conditions during the final approach constitute highly relevant background information to assess the standard scenario used for the definition of revised wake turbulence separations.

Wake vortex predictions using the probabilistic two-phase wake vortex model (P2P) are used to investigate the incidents in detail by using data from the flight data recorder, meteorological instrumentation at the airport and numerical weather prediction.

In the best documented cases, the flight tracks through the vortices could be reconstructed in good agreement with wake vortex predictions and recorded aircraft reactions. Out of the eight plausible wake vortex encounters, five were characterized by weak crosswinds below 1.5 m/s combined with tailwinds. This meteorological situation appears favourable for encounters because, on the one hand, weak crosswinds may compensate the self-induced lateral propagation of the upwind vortex, such that it may hover over the runway directly in the flight path of the following aircraft. On the other hand, tailwinds limit the propagation of the so-called end effects caused by the breakdown of lift during touchdown.

The installation of plate lines beyond the runway tails may improve safety by reducing the number of wake vortex encounters.

The conducted investigations provide high originality and value for both science and operational application.

Prior studies of how service quality evolves during the service delivery process have used aggregate case data in retrospect or have not obtained objective measures of the actual dimensions of the service encounter on an individual basis. Reports on a study of an actual hotel service delivery process partitioned into five distinct service encounters; check‐in, the room, the restaurant, the breakfast and check‐out. The aim was to investigate how quality factors were related to their respective encounters and how cumulative satisfaction levels impact on each other and over time. Average satisfaction levels for each of the five encounters were found to be significantly different. Moreover, there was a clear trend in the cumulative satisfaction results. Check‐in resulted in high satisfaction, the room was not so satisfying and the restaurant rated the worst. Satisfaction scores rose after the breakfast experience and rose again after check‐out. A factor analysis of all the questions, for a hypothesized five‐factor solution, explained 78 per cent of the variation. All the first four encounters loaded highly and collectively on four distinct factors. The fifth factor largely comprised correct check‐in booking and a correct bill on check‐out. Finally, a logistic regression model was used to rank the importance of the quality factors on their respective encounters. This information can be used to assist with the quality improvement of each encounter.

Information encountering is the serendipitous acquisition of information that requires low or no involvement and expectation of users. The purpose of this paper is to model the explicit process and the implicit factors of online information encountering, i.e. how and why it occurs.

The critical incident technique was adopted to collect qualitative data from 16 interview participants. They contributed 27 true incidents of online information encountering which were used to identify the key phases of the encountering process. They also commented on the factors that they thought had an influence on the chance of the occurrence of encountering.

The macro-process of information encountering is composed of three phases. First, browsing, searching, or social interaction provides the context for encountering; second, the encountering occurrence consists of three steps – noticing the stimuli, examining the content, and acquiring interesting or useful content; and third, the information encountered will be explored further, saved, used, or shared. The 14 influencing factors of information encountering obtained divide into three clusters. User-related factors include sensitivity, emotions, expertise, attitudes, intentionality, curiosity, activity diversity; information-related factors include type, relevance, quality, visibility, and sources; and environment-related factors include time limits and interface usability.

This study engenders useful implications for designing information encountering experience. The changeable nature of some influencing factors suggests that encountering can be elicited through the purposive design of encountering support features or even encountering systems, and the macro-process depicts the natural occurring mechanisms of encountering for the design to follow.

This paper aims to discuss partitioning an air travel service encounter into touchpoints according to elements and phases, which are depth and breadth, respectively, using the conceptual framework of Le Bel. The empirical findings further the dialogue about the service encounter construct.

A total of 12 distinctive touchpoints within the joining and intensive phases of any air travel service encounter are reviewed for importance using travel purpose and nationality as segmentation variables. Respondents participated through an online questionnaire and face‐to‐face approach from a fieldworker; they were not engaged in an air travel service encounter at the time of the study. Data analysis includes descriptive statistics, independent sample t‐tests and paired sample t‐tests where the latter considered a named airline from the region.

The findings indicate touchpoints to be sufficiently distinctive that partitioning a service encounter provides opportunities for quality improvements directed at customer satisfaction outcomes. Notably, greater importance is typically given to the intensive phase touchpoints than those in the joining phases thus placing more emphasis on activities within service encounters' simultaneous production/consumption. Touchpoint preference is evident for travel purpose and passenger nationality segmentation criteria. When an airline is named, respondents appear more discriminating about touchpoint quality compared to those in generic service encounters.

Academically, partitioning strengthens the links between the service encounter construct and service quality and provides additional information beyond expectations‐perceptions results. Industry value is derived for practitioner marketers when distinctive touchpoints are taken from a partitioned service encounter providing opportunities for segmenting and targeting consumers accordingly.

The purpose of this paper is to extend thinking on service recovery processes and satisfaction with service recovery, using multi‐dimensional consumer outcomes. The objective of the work was to propose that satisfaction with service recovery should be based on customers' expectations of the recovery encounter, which would be shaped by their expectations of “non‐failed” encounters.

The paper adopts a theoretical approach. Using the existing service recovery literature as well as the traditional services literature, the conceptual framework and associated research propositions are developed.

The proposed framework suggests that service recovery is a service encounter it its own right. The effectiveness of recovery encounters will be based on how encounters operate relative to customer expectations and experiences with regard to the recovery activity.

The research propositions and proposed framework need further empirical investigation.

The proposed framework suggests that managing service recovery should be undertaken in a similar fashion to managing any service, and thus managers need to understand customers' recovery expectations. Organisations also need to consider how a recovery action impacts on a range of customer outcomes, as focusing on one aspect will not capture consumers' full set of behaviours.

The proposed model identifies that service recovery should be evaluated with regard to consumers' recovery expectations and satisfaction is not based on expectations with regard to non‐failed encounters.

The article “Culture shocks” in inter-cultural service encounters was published in 1999. The purpose of this paper is to analyze how the scientific discussion about this issue has developed and which open research questions are still awaiting solutions.

The main contributions of the original article are evaluated in the light of the current state of research. Simultaneously, the scientific development is commented on the basis of the original theoretical and empirical insights.

The original article belongs to those that initiated an extraordinary development of the research field. Aspects of inter-cultural encounters have found increasing attention in service marketing research. However, some fundamental problems of inter-cultural studies are still unresolved, and some of the theoretical and management oriented stimuli of the 1999 paper still seem worthy of consideration.

The retrospective analysis gives insight into the scientific development of the research on inter-cultural service encounters. It identifies relevant development lines, new perspectives and open questions for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to develop and describe the implementation of a novel method for creating interval-level metrics for objectively assessing police officer behaviors during an encounter with the public. These behaviors constitute officer performance and affect the probability of desirable encounter outcomes. The metrics measure concrete, micro-level performance in the common types of complex, dynamic, and low-information police-public encounters that often require immediate action using “naturalistic” decision making. Difficulty metrics also were developed to control for situational variability. The utility of measuring what officers do vs probabilistic outcomes is explored with regard to informing policymaking, field practice, and training.

Metric sets were developed separately for three types of police-public encounters: deadly force judgment and decision making, cross-cultural tactical social interaction, and crisis intervention. In each, “reverse concept mapping” was used with a different diverse focus group of “true experts” to authoritatively deconstruct implicit concepts and derive important variables. Variables then were scaled with Thurstone’s method using 198 diverse expert trainers to create interval-level metrics for performance and situational difficulty. Metric utility was explored during two experimental laboratory studies and in response to a problematic police encounter.

Objective, interval-level metric sets were developed for measuring micro-level police performance and encounter difficulty. Validation and further refinement are required.

This novel method provides a practical way to rapidly develop metrics that measure micro-level performance during police-public encounters much more precisely than was previously possible.

The metrics developed provide a foundation for measuring officers’ performance as they exercise discretion, engage people, and affect perceptions of police legitimacy.