“The service encounter: diagnosing favorable and unfavorable incidents”
By Mary Jo Bitner, Bernard H. Booms & Mary Stanfield Tetreault.

a. introduction
This article, extracted from the Journal of Marketing of January 1990, was written by Mary Jo Bitner, Bernard H. Booms and Mary Stanfield Tetreault. Starting from the fact that the observable service quality seems to be declining, the authors tried to identify particular events causing customers to distinguish satisfactory from dissatisfactory services encounters. In order to do so, they conducted a study among customers of airlines, restaurants and hotels, asking them to identify the underlying causes of their satisfaction /dissatisfaction. The authors then used the Critical Incident Technique (CIT) to classify and categorize the results into groups and subgroups. This method, by using content analysis of stories rather than quantitative solutions, was particularly useful in this case where the existing documentation on the subject was rare and usually voluntary general.
b. Method
The CIT method was used to categorize similar incidents into groups. Three major groups were formed and then divided into 12 sub groups. The following table is summing up these successive divisions:
GROUPS
Group 1
Employee response to service delivery system failures Group 2
Employee response to customer needs and requests Group 3
Unprompted and unsolicited employees actions

SUBGROUPS Response to unavailable service Response to special needs customers. Attention paid to customer Response to unreasonably slow service Response to customers preferences Truly out of the ordinary employee behavior Response to other core service failures. Response to admitted customer error Employee behaviors in the contact of cultural norms Response to potentially disruptive others Gestalt evaluation (everything was good/ terrible…) Exemplary performance under adverse circumstance.

c. Results analysis.
After having