Disparate satisfaction scores? Consider your customer’s country-of-origin: a case study

Although post-transaction surveys (i.e. trailer calls) allow service organizations to better understand their customers, these surveys inherently assume that all customers have the same service expectations of the organization’s service quality. This research reveals that telecommunications customers from different countries of origin have different service expectations; thus, post-transaction surveys based on this assumption can be flawed. We conduct in-depth interviews with recent immigrants in Israel, as well as local customers, to evaluate their expectations of their remote (i.e. telephone) service recovery encounters. Interviews included customers from each of the three primary regions from which they originated: Israel (home), former Soviet Union, and Ethiopia. The data show that the organization’s customers have vastly different expectations of how the firm should handle a called-in service failure, which influenced their post-transaction survey scores. Organizations must realize that their customers have varying service expectations due to cultural influences, which in turn affect their post-transaction survey scores.