Employees’ Perception of the Role of Communication with Customers in Service Encounters

Abstract: Communication is one of the most important perspectives in service encounters. Communication is a connection between service employees and customers that could help them to interact, to understand and to establish relationships. In service organizational context, service representatives play a critical role in customer service communication. They are considered as the link connecting an organization to its customers. Therefore, perception of the important role of communication is required for their work. This thesis aims to examine how service employees consider the role of communication and how they manage communication behaviors in customer encounters and in building relationships with customers. Qualitative interview method has been used to investigate service employees. The data collection for the study has been performed through the semi-structures interviews with the bank tellers at the different banks in Vietnam, to examine their consideration and management of communication behaviors in service encounters and in building relationship with customers. The findings of this study show that in the context of service, the bank tellers are aware of that communication is important in service encounter and in building relationship with customers. According to them, communication impacts directly on customers' satisfaction and decides the success of encounters. In addition, they consider that good perception about the role of communication in service encounters and in establishing relationships with customers helped the bank tellers to cope with problems in emotional displays and to avoid discriminatory service.