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Presents the current state of the methodological discussion on the measurement of perceived service quality. Describes two approaches ‐ attribute‐based methods and the sequential incident technique (SIT). Outlines the concept and basic assumptions of SIT describes an empirical SIT study applied to measure the quality of perception of guests in club resort. Suggests that the SIT is a valuable complement to the traditional mix of quality measurement methods. Discusses a number of limitations of this method and sets out some managerial implications.

The purpose of this paper is to develop and apply the sequential incident laddering technique as a novel approach for measuring customer service experiences. The proposed approach aims to correspond with the concept's theoretical foundation in the extant literature.

The paper applies the sequential incident laddering technique to measure customer service experiences. The technique integrates two well‐established methods in service marketing: sequential incident and laddering techniques. The data collected from 41 customers in a hotel and restaurant experience context illustrate that the method corresponds with the key themes of the proposed experience concept and experience formation process.

Applying the proposed technique reveals first, the customer's cognitive and emotional responses to company stimuli. Second, the salient customer cognitions and emotions across several episodes of the service interaction process are identified. Third, the personal values which drive the customer's service experience are disclosed.

The empirical study is a first illustration of the proposed measurement approach in only one company based on a limited sample size. The methodological contributions and development opportunities for further applications are set out for different contexts and in combination with other methods.

The proposed method integrates customer and company‐related constructs. Therefore, the data collected can provide managers with guidelines for customer service experience design based on detailed customer feedback.

The paper proposes an innovative measurement approach to customer service experiences which can support knowledge development in an important marketing area.

The traditional critical incident technique (CIT) and variants of the same have frequently been applied in service research for several decades. The technique has often been used to capture data on and analyse both negative and positive critical incidents. While one technique displays hosts of critical incidents in benchmark‐type series (SIT), another variant describes the dynamism in one discrete critical incident and a third the dynamism of the configuration of critical incidents (SPAT). In this article the different variants are discussed in relation to psychological theory focusing on the concepts of time, history and memory. To be able to analyse the criticality from the individual customer’s perspective, we argue that one must understand the significance of critical incidents in the light of human memory mechanisms and judgement processes. The discussion forms the basis for suggesting a new, tentative framework for analysing the criticality of critical incidents. We call this criticality critical incident technique (CCIT).

This study examined perceptual similarities and differences between customers and employees in terms of critical service incidents. Specifically we explored the extent to which customers and employees were similar or different in summary perceptions of service failures and recovery, the attributions made by the two perspectives in terms of causes for failures and recovery efforts, and whether each perspective believed that age, gender or race contributed to service failures or recovery. The critical incidents technique was used to collect 1,512 customer‐reported incidents and 390 employee‐reported incidents. Results revealed that customers and employees had both similar and different views depending on the ultimate outcome of the encounter. Overall, customers and employees were fairly similar in their perceptions regarding failures that ultimately resulted in a good recovery effort. However, the two perspectives differed in their views of service failures that accompanied a poor recovery effort. Conclusions and implications for practice are also provided.

Focuses on the criticality of critical incidents in customer relationships. Aims to discuss the theoretical and practical implications of the notion of “critical” in a critical incident. Why is something perceived as critical? What does it lead to? Is criticality a feature built into the service or is it a contextually‐defined phenomenon, depending both on the customer, the service provider, the interaction and the surrounding relationship environment? Suggests a contextual framework for describing, analysing and understanding critical incidents, based on the idea that critical incidents are always embedded in customer relationships. Two interdependent context dimensions are used: the time dimension, and the situational dimension. These elements, combined, lead to a focus on customer‐perceived and relationship‐oriented contexts, which reveal new insights into the role of critical incidents. This framework is used in an empirical study concerning business customers’ perceptions of “critical incidents” in their relationship with a hotel. The findings indicate that the majority of positive and negative critical incidents reported had only a minor impact on customer behavior.

The aim of this paper is to compare the use of critical incident technique (CIT) for gathering student feedback in higher education (HE) with the more traditional and commonly used questionnaire survey method.

The investigation involved a critical evaluation of the standard self‐completion, multi‐question “tick‐box” quantitative survey questionnaire traditionally employed to collect student feedback in HE, against the more qualitative critical incident technique that was tested within the HE context. This evaluation was supported by a review of the extant literature to determine the advantages and disadvantages of both feedback methods and a comparison of the data gathered from university students using both survey instruments. Conclusions were then drawn regarding the value of both methods. The criteria used for the comparison were the design and administration of the survey instruments, analysis and quality of the data collected, and finally, the potential usefulness of the data to HE managers.

The main issue regarding suitability of approach is resource utilisation. The CIT questionnaire is much quicker and easier to design than the traditional questionnaire, asking only a small number of questions. However, completion, input and analysis of the CIT questionnaire take longer than the standard tick‐box questionnaire. The richness of the data more than compensates for these drawbacks. In principle, the qualitative critical incident technique should be used to complement the existing methods of gathering student feedback in order to find out what is significant to students. However, in practice, it is more likely that managers within HE will continue to use the more traditional survey questionnaire, because of the limited resources available to them.

Not only is CIT a method that can be used by researchers in the education sector nationally and internationally, to gather rich and useful data about the student experience but it may also be useful for gathering information from other stakeholders.

The paper is the first to use CIT to gather feedback from students on their university experience. It proposes that, in order to obtain valid and reliable data on which to base service provision decisions, university management should consider using this qualitative technique in combination with more traditional quantitative methods of gathering student feedback.

Service recovery has attracted increasing attention in recent years as a result of the premise that service failures are inevitable, but dissatisfied customers are not. However, many methodological obstacles, e.g. the question of how failure and recovery incidents are collected, have not been overcome yet. In this article, the author suggests a process approach by which not only dissatisfied or complaining customers are surveyed but due attention is paid to a representative sample of both satisfied and dissatisfied customers. This approach is supported by the corresponding results, which is not surprising, since failure incidents and recoveries are indeed specific to indvidual processes. An analysis of the effect of good recoveries resulted in the recovery paradox being found in all but one process type.

Proposes responding to earlier calls for further research into “fraudulent” or “feigned” customer complaints, and providing insights which explore and describe the motivations and forms of such deliberate “illegitimate” customer complaints.

Critical incident technique was utilized in analyzing 104 interviews with customers who had knowingly made an illegitimate complaint within the six months prior to the interview. Data collection stopped at the point of theoretical saturation and was subsequently analyzed according to the coding procedures advocated by Strauss and Corbin (open, axial and selective coding).

Two key insights emerged from data analysis. First, coding procedures revealed four distinct forms of customer complainants. These are labeled; “one‐off complainants”, “opportunistic complainants”, “conditioned complainants”, and “professional complainants”. Second, six main motives for articulating fraudulent complaints were uncovered during data analysis. These are termed; “freeloaders”, “fraudulent returners”, “fault transferors”, “solitary ego gains”, “peer‐induced esteem seekers”, and “disruptive gains”.

The study is constrained by its exploratory design and qualitative methods employed. Subsequently, future studies could employ survey methods to improve empirical generalizability. Future studies could adopt a more inclusive approach and incorporate insights from employees, managers, and other relevant actors within service encounters.

Practical implications highlighted by the study include a need for businesses to examine and, in many cases, reevaluate their personnel training, customer complaint and service recovery procedures. Furthermore, managers may wish to enforce mechanisms wherein customer complaints are monitored and tracked in a manner that assists in the identification and challenging of re‐offending fraudulent complainers.

The study constitutes the first systematic attempt to explore and describe illegitimate customer complaining behaviors.

This paper aims to explore satisfactory and dissatisfactory student‐professor encounters in higher education from a student's perspective. The critical incident technique (CIT) is used to categorise positive and negative student‐professor interactions and to reveal quality dimensions of professors.

An exploratory study using an online application of the well‐established CIT method was conducted. The study took place at a large European university. A total of 96 students took part in the study on a voluntary basis and reported 164 incidents. Respondents were aged between 19 and 24 years (x=23.2) and slightly more female students (52 per cent) filled in the online CIT questionnaire than male students (48 per cent). On average, every student provided 1.7 incidents.

The results of the critical incident sorting process support previous classification systems that used three major groups to thoroughly represent the domain of (un)satisfactory student‐professor encounters. The results of the CIT study also revealed ten quality dimensions of professors, corroborating previous research in this area.

Owing to the exploratory nature of the study and the scope and size of its student sample, the results outlined are tentative in nature. The research study also only investigates the experiences of one stakeholder group.

Gaining knowledge of students' classroom experiences should be beneficial for professors to design their teaching programmes. Based on the results, universities might consider the introduction of student contracts or student satisfaction guarantees to manage student expectations effectively.

The paper was the first to successfully apply an online version of the CIT techniques to the issue of higher education services. This paper shows that the CIT method is a useful tool for exploring student‐professor encounters in higher education. The paper has hopefully opened up an area of research and methodology that could reap considerable further benefits for researchers interested in this area.

This paper aims to present a methodology for assessing end‐user experiences of workplace environments and proposes an “experience sheet” as a way to illustrate the findings.

In the theoretical part, the article combines understanding from post‐occupancy evaluations in the facilities management field with service process audits in the hospitability sector. This methodology is then tested in a case environment.

The findings suggest that the methodology and the experience sheet provide a usable and interesting way of assessing user experience in the workplace environment.

This article offers an illustrative way to understand user experience in workplace environments, and through that helps in improving existing working environments and in creating new ones.

This article combines theoretical understanding in a cross‐disciplinary manner in a novel way, and through that introduces a usable method for workplace improvement for practitioners.