Faculty & Research
The Combined Effects of the Physical Environment and Employee Behavior on Customer Perception of Restaurant Service Quality
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Vol 48 No 1
By: Eileen A. Wall and Leonard L. Berry
Executive Summary: While a restaurant probably will not survive if its food is poor, restaurant customers use a wide variety of clues to determine their final assessment of the restaurant and the meal it served. Those clues can be grouped into three categories. The first group, functional clues, describes the efficiency of the service and the quality of the food itself. The second category, mechanic clues, embodies design and atmosphere, which create a set of expectations. Those expectations must be confirmed by the third category of clues, humanic clues, which comprise the demeanor and emotional aspect of the servers. Experience has shown that excellent functional clues alone will not ensure a restaurant's success and that the other two other sets of clues play a large part in customers' satisfaction with the restaurant. A study of customers' assessments of a casual-dining restaurant found, for instance, that the lowest customer satisfaction occurred when negative humanic clues (in the form of cold, unresponsive servers) failed to support the warmth promised by a pleasant environment.
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- The Combined Effects of the Physical Environment and Employee Behavior on Customer Perception of Restaurant Service Quality By: Eileen A. Wall and Leonard L. Berry
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