Customers Responses to the Emotional Labor During Service Encounters

Abstract

Service employees need to exhibit positive role in emotional temperament in service encounter process to enhance employee satisfaction and customer loyalty. This study examined complex process between emotional labor, job satisfaction, word of mouth, and customer loyalty. Customer mood played as a moderating role. This study used 285 sample size of customers and services employees of banks of Bahwalpur, Pakistan. The results of our study found that employee emotional strategies of surface acting and deep acting make different impact on employee satisfaction and customer loyalty. Surface acting did not show any significant impact on customer loyalty, employee satisfaction, and word of mouth. On the other hand, employee satisfaction partially mediated the relationship between deep acting and customer loyalty, as well as fully mediation between deep acting and customer word of mouth. Meanwhile, customer mood partially moderated the relationship with different relationships. Our study is one of the rare studies to conduct empirical study in order to test the mediation and moderation relationship among emotional labor, employee satisfaction, customer word of mouth, and customer loyalty in banking sector.