Abstract:

Focus on the use of interpersonal buyer-seller interactions dominates in extant literature. This paper aims to fill this void by contributing to extant knowledge on customer interactions with technology-based self-service delivery options. The extent to which technological interface that enables customers to produce a service independent of a direct service employee involvement is used by hotels of various categories in France is highlighted. We assume that there can be significant dissimilarities in the response time when using emails to communicate with customers. These dissimilarities are investigated on the basis of an emailing action that encompasses sending a typical room-booking request to French hotels. Exhaustive samples of 240 hotels spread out in 120 cities located in France constituted the target group. Oneway ANOVA testing differences between means was used to assess the impact of the hotel category on response time among hotels in France. Our findings showed significant dissimilarity in responsiveness across hotels categories. The implication of the findings is basically the fact that responsiveness is most likely the first step in providing good quality technology-based buyer-seller interactions to create service outcomes using the Internet/e-mail.