Intercultural service encounters (ICSEs): Challenges and opportunities for international services marketers

Abstract

Intercultural service encounters (ICSEs) involve interactions between customers and employees from diverse cultures and these are growing in importance due to the increase in the number of immigrants, migrant workers, students, tourists and businesspeople traveling to other countries, with the rapid rise in globalization in recent years. Prior research on ICSEs has used diverse theoretical perspectives to study this phenomenon, exploring the effects of perceived cultural distance, interaction comfort, inter-role congruence, service outcomes and roles on customer evaluations such as perceive service quality and customer satisfaction. A few studies also explore the role of consumer ethnocentrism and intercultural competence as moderators. However, due to the nascent nature of this field of research, there are still many unanswered questions and research gaps. This book chapter reviews the extant literature on intercultural service encounters to identify a few important research gaps and proposes many useful directions for future research to address those gaps in a meaningful manner.