COMMUNICATION DYNAMICS IN THE SERVICE ENCOUNTER - A LINGUISTIC STUDY IN A HOTEL CONFERENCE DEPARTMENT

The importance of service encounters for the purpose of creating and m aintaining good customer relationships is widely recognised. This stud y focuses on the quality of face-to-face communication during service encounters between service providers and their customers at a help des k of a hotel conference department. Communication is believed to be in fluenced by the social activities that are pursued in a particular enc ounter. A stepwise method based on linguistic theory is developed to r ecord, analyse and interpret transcriptions of verbal and non-verbal b ehaviour by means of audio and video recordings. Utterances have been coded with regard to their function and content and are organised in a so called molecular coding scheme. This scheme models the dynamic int erplay between communicators and makes it possible to analyse contextu al influences on communication. It is believed that the approach advoc ated here could be of use for managers of service operations where com munication is paramount.