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Service culture and value experiences of everyday service: North-South divide

Anu Helkkula1, Tiziana Russo Spena2, Cristina Mele2, Valeria Improta2, Carol Kelleher3

- 1Hanken School of Economics, Finland, 2Universita di Napoli, Italy, 3_University College Cork, Ireland

The purpose of our study is to analyse individual service culture and value experiences of everyday services. Specifically, we understand service culture as the collective cultural dimension of individual service experiences. We focus on regional service cultures in Northern and Southern Europe and draw on Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) in order to understand how individuals make sense of their service experiences, meaning of resources and resulting value experiences within a collective cultural frame that affects their value experiences. We argue that service culture creates a foundation for current service and value experiences, expected service and value experiences, and imaginary ideal service and value experiences. We therefore contribute to service research in experiential value by extending service researchers’ focus beyond individual service experiences to collective service experiences of service culture that creates a foundation for current and expected service and value experiences.

1. Introduction

The study of culture has been an important topic across a number of business domains. For example, in organizational studies, culture is defined as “a set of values, beliefs, and norms that direct the thinking and decision making of a group” (Leininger and McFarland 2006). On the management side, this simplistic approach to culture in service experiences has been questioned due to increasing emphasis on the service economy (Pine and Gilmore 1998).

In the service research, culture has been dealt with both within the international service management literature and service research more generally. In particular the exploration of the service culture has interested researchers in the context of the internationalization of services (e.g. De Ruyter et al., 1998; Hyder et al., 2009), the role of culture of service organisations (e.g. Wilson, 1995, Webster and White, 2010; Akiko. 2012.), the impact of culture on service quality and recovery (e.g. Laroche et al., 2004; Ladhari et al., 2011; Wan, 2013 ). With some exceptions (e.g. Chan et al., 2012), the main corpus of service research seems to focus more on the perspective of provider service organisation, while less is said on consumers and how he/she makes sense of his/her service and value experiences within a collective cultural frame.

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The more recent elaboration of Service-Dominant logic (SDL) (Vargo and Lusch, 2008) has greatly illuminated on consumer participation in value and service process. SDL scholars have argued for understanding value as exclusively, located within the phenomenological experience of beneficiary (Vargo and Lusch 2008), which extends beyond the dyadic provider-costumer relationship to include multidirectional resource integration (Chandler and Vargo, 2011). This has been followed by an increased emphasis on the embedded and contextual nature of value and the importance of shared institutional logics and socio-cultural ties that influence value co-creation (Vargo and Lusch, 2011, 2012; Helkkula et al., 2012, Edvardsson et al., 2011, 2012; Jaakkola et al., 2015).

Notwithstanding these studies, the socio-cultural dimension of service experiences has seldom been the focus of service research to date. In particular, less is known about the enabling and constraining interplay between socio-cultural context and individual sense-making of value experience. However, as service experiences are acknowledged to be social and context sensitive, service studies need to respond to the call for greater contextual sensitivity in service co-creation research (Chandler and Vargo, 2011; Akaka et al., 2015). Thus the socio-cultural dimension of service experiences has to be further investigated in service research.

In this study, we draw on Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) in order to understand individuals making sense of their service experiences, meaning of resources and resulting value experiences within a cultural frame that affects their social actions (McCracken 1986). The specific purpose of our study is to analyse individual service culture and value experiences of everyday services. Specifically, we understand service culture as the collective cultural dimension of individual service experiences.

We explore consumers’ challenges in relation to the consumption of everyday service and how they use their culturally situated understanding of imaginary, ideal service in their everyday lives. We focus on two regional service cultures representing the European North-South divide: Helsinki in Finland and Naples in Italy. Collective cultural ideals in different socio-cultural contexts create a foundation for individual service experiences as they drive consumption choices (Arnould, 2006; Arnould and Thompson, 2005.).

The remainder of the article is organized as follows: First, we characterize the collective cultural dimension of service experience; next, we present the Event-Based Narrative Inquiry Technique (EBNIT) (Helkkula and Pihlström, 2010) used for understanding of cultural dimensions in service experience. Following this, we outline and discuss our key findings in relation to how service consumers individually and collectively make sense of challenges relating to their current service experiences, and how they create imaginary ideal service experiences using their culturally situated understanding. We contribute to service research by addressing the cultural dimension of service experiences and resulting value experiences that has gained little attention in experiential value research. We suggest future research directions and encourage both researchers and managers to analyse the collective cultural dimension in order to co-create valuable service that facilitates customers’ everyday lives.

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2. Cultural dimension of service experiences

As previously outlined, in the service research, culture has been dealt with both within the international service management literature and service research more generally. However, extant insights from Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) help address this gap.

During the last decades, the socio-cultural aspects of consumption actions have gained momentum in the most of consumer research tradition, and in particular in CCT. Consumer studies have evidenced how consumers look for a complex mix of value from offerings including functional, economic and symbolic benefits, hedonistic experiences, and emotions (Holbrook, 1999; Sanchez-Fernandez et al., 2009). However, these studies remain still disconnected and scattered among different research fields with no unified perspective able to explain the complexity of consumer actions within the broader socio-historical frame of globalization and new market phenomena (Arnould, 2006; Arnould and Thompson, 2005).

An attempt towards a unified perspective has been recently provided by researchers grouped by Arnould and Thompson (2005) in the research tradition of CCT, which addresses the dynamic relationships between consumer actions and cultural meanings. According to Arnould (2006), the major contribution of CCT is the emphasis on studies on cultural complexity based on the assumptions of heterogeneous distribution of meanings and the multiplicity of overlapping cultural groupings existing within the market.

In particular, CCT research has provided a theoretical understanding of consumer choice and consumption in differing social and cultural contexts (Arnould, 2006; Arnould and Thompson, 2005; Holttinen, 2014). The ideologies and cultural ideals that drive consumption choices vary within in different socio-cultural context; in this sense culturally situated understandings influence service consumption (Arnould, 2006; Arnould and Thompson, 2005; Venkatesh, et al., 2006). Arnould et al. (2006) stress that consumers buy meaning and experience more than products. As cultural meanings are collective, and experiences individually determined, individual service experiences are co-created and embedded in a collective social context. Individual experiences may be different from those intended by commercial producers, who often aim for a specific type of a service experience (Cova and Dalli, 2009; Schau et al., 2009). In the CCT perspective, culture represents the real fabric of experience, meaning, and action (Arnould, 2006), and consumers are mainly seen as identity seekers (Venkatesh et al., 2006), who collectively co-create experiences in their daily lives. Thus, all kind of experiences - including of individual consumption - are inherently interactive and socially based (Arnould and Thompson, 2005; Schau et al., 2009). Consumers’ belief systems and practices, together with their underlying structures, play central roles in building relationships with others and in their experience formation (Arnould and Thompson, 2005).

Many CCT researchers have distinguished in their empirical exploration the great variety of marketplace cultures built on the imbricated layers of cultural meanings and practices. The interest has been especially on the empirical analysis of fan communities (Kozinets 2001), brand communities (Muniz and O'Guinn, 2001; Schau et al., 2009) and consumer subcultures or tribes (Cova and Cova, 2002). Such

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studies bring consumption practices into focus and illustrate how particular manifestations of consumer practices are constituted, sustained, transformed, and shaped in a social-cultural context.

Recently Thompson et al. (2013) put forward the idea that consumers may be seen as free and community embedded agents, who use consumption in meaningful ways in their everyday life contexts. Others stress the role of subcultures of consumption that offer co-creation opportunities for resource integration (Thomas et al., 2013). Thus, collective consumer culture and particularly sub-cultures denote the social arrangement in which the relations between lived culture and material resources including products and services are integrated in a collective co-creation experience.

Based on the assumption that people live in a social and culturally constituted world, overall these studies share a broad interest in the ways that culturally shared meanings and practices frame action and experience and are produced, reproduced, and transformed in market-related experiences.

More recently, highlighting the reflexive relationship between socio-cultural dimensions and consumer agency, culture has become a hot topic in CCT research. Scholars have investigated value-creation configurations and consumer actions that are not strictly tied to communities or similar closed groups of interest (Arnould, 2007; Peñaloza and Mish, 2011).

While service research and CCT can be seen as different streams of research, research, the alliance of SDL logic and CCT was already identified in 2006 (Arnould, 2006). For example, as highlighted earlier, SDL has presented the multi-layered and nested context of service ecosystems as a critical dimension in value co-creation (value-in-context) (Chandler and Vargo, 2011). This has inspired more authors to claim for a natural alliance between CCT and SDL, with cultural perspectives seen as the key mean to further elaborate on the value co-creation and market phenomena (Arnould, 2007; Peñaloza and Mish, 2011; Thompson et al., 2013; Akaka et al., 2015; Jaakkola et al., 2015).

Even if CCT and service research have found mutual interest in research, further elaborations on value and experience contextualization are needed. For example, Peñaloza and Mish (2011), Akaka et al. (2015), and Jaakkola et al. (2015) note that incorporating CCT informed cultural perspective to service research offers a promising point of departure for understanding the experiential view of value and contextual social and cultural aspects that frame consumers’ experiences and practices.

3. Method

As part of our empirical study, we conducted 78 narrative interviews using Event-Based Narrative Inquiry Technique (EBNIT) (Helkkula and Pihlström, 2010). The interviews were conducted in Naples (48) and in Helsinki (30), in Southern and Northern Europe in May-October 2013 in order to explore different service culture contexts indicative of the North-South divide. The duration of the interviews were

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between 3 and 20 minutes, and covered the age range from 18 to 65 years. Overall, the interviews explored the challenges consumers have in their everyday lives and their innovative ideas how these challenges could be solved.

All 78 respondents were interviewed and contacted by Master students, who were asked to select respondents within different age ranges (see Table 1). The students were trained in the use of EBNIT in advance. The EBNIT interview technique combines narratives interviews, focusing on critical events, with a projective technique using metaphors. Projective techniques have been used to transfer narratives from their customary context, such as culture, to new contexts, interlining relationships of the contexts from which they are borrowed (Goodman, 1988). The purpose of each interview was to find out the everyday service experience that the respondent would like to revise or change in his/her life.

In relation to the interview format itself, firstly respondents were asked to recall a challenging service experience in their everyday life (critical event), and then tell a story about their experience. After that they were encouraged to create an imaginary story of an ideal service experience. The metaphor of a magic wand was used to trigger respondents to think about service consumption beyond their normal everyday experiences.

The following questions were posed in the interviews:

Please tell me about a service related event that happened recently or a service related event that happened in the past that you can remember: what happened or what is it that you don't like in your everyday service experience?

Why would you like to change this service experience in your everyday life, what is it about the service experience that you like / don't like?

Now I will give you a magic wand. Everything is possible. No financial, technical, time or other restrictions. In relation to the service experience that you mentioned, please tell me what would happen in an ideal case, where your magic wand made everything possible? How might you live/experience that event?

The interviews were transcribed, and two researchers had discussions with the interviewers in order to elaborate their observations. Then two researchers read through the results several times. The experienced challenges in service experiences, imaginary ideal service experiences, themes and service culture dimension emerged from the data. We now use the North-South divide to present our findings.

4. Findings

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4.1 Finnish service experiences

In this section, we analyze and comment on the Finnish interviews in order to understand what are critical events in everyday service experiences and what constitutes ideal service experience. We take into consideration two main focal points: the challenging service experience highlighted by the respondent in question and how the respondent would like to change it, if everything was possible. Respondents interviewed in Finland had challenging service experiences in relation to both public and private sector services. Finnish experiences underline that different types of public and private services were mainly functioning well. The challenge highlighted related mainly to the friendliness of customer service, or the human touch of the service. For example, a middle-aged woman recounted her experience of using public buses. She recounted how a bus driver did not typically greet customers but, unexpectedly one morning, he said hello. Her ideal service experience is a service where bus drivers always say good morning and greet customers in a friendly way.

“Normally when I take the bus here in Helsinki the driver never says anything and you just pass in silence. But today I was a bit slow, and when I passed the driver he looked at me. Then he stared at me, and he said “huomenta”, (good morning in Finnish). I was startled and thought “Oh my God! He said good morning to me!” So I started to say “Oh, yes. Good morning. Good morning”. Oh dear!” Normally they say nothing. But there was another woman and she didn’t first understand either what happened. The driver said “huomenta” to the woman and she answer back “Oh, sorry, sorry. Yes, yes.”. (Anna, 36-50, Helsinki).

And she adds:

“I would take my wand and I would strike it on all bus drivers every morning so the people would wake up and think ‘Ok, I have to remember to say good morning to every passenger’” (Anna, 36-50, Helsinki)

She refers to her collective experience of this specific service culture in Helsinki:

“I think it is an urban legend. Everybody has some story about these drivers, as they say nothing. In case they say “Hi!”, you don’t know how to react.”

Lack of personal touch in service was also a challenge highlighted by the 50+-year old male Antti, who had had problems contacting a teleoperator’s customer service agent in order to correct a mistake in his invoice “They are loosing a lot, they look at the bottom line in all that they do, they don't look at you as an individual, they look at the percentages, the thousands or tens of thousands of euros that they lose - or as they put it, of turnover - and they forget that behind every thousand euros there are one thousand customers who are paying for it. They really don't have much need to change their customer service. But, you know, people get really cheesed off by the non-responsiveness. So, I mean, it's a simple thing, it would be a simple thing to

solve. (Antti, 50+, Helsinki)“

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Some other respondents refer to unfriendly customer service in a fine dining restaurant/café; for example one respondent tells about his bad experience because the staff in the restaurant has a really bad attitude towards a young family, because they have their baby with them.

Another respondent in a fine-dine restaurant found that the waiter wasn’t nice and seemed quite unwilling to serve. The wine served with the main course was really cold and the respondent didn’t like it, because it was red wine and it’s not supposed to be so cold. After a while, the respondent went to the kitchen and said that the wine is too cold, but they just answered: ”we can’t do anything about it, that’s the temperature we have in here.” And the respondent was sent back to his table.

Their ideal experience also related to a restaurant service, which would be service-oriented, meaning that the waiter was courteous and welcoming and offers laid-back and personal service, but which is not too meddlesome.

Also a young woman refers to unfriendly workers talking about poor service at the local supermarket, Valintatalo in Töölö, where staff members never say “hi” and are not nice with customers.

“The checkout staff are not nice, and they don’t even say ”Hi”. They just wander around and it is otherwise also a bad store.” (Jola, 18-35, Helsinki)

And her ideal experience is one in where personnel is kind:

“In my ideal service someone is at all times at the cashiers’ desk. Also, there would be a staff member in the store that you can ask if you search for something... Well normal customer service... Improvement in that. (Jola, 18-35, Helsinki)

4.2 Italian service experience

In this section we analyse the findings of the Italian interviews in order to understand what are the critical events about everyday service experiences and ideal imagined service faced by Italian consumers in Southern Italy. The majority of respondents refer to a poor performance in public service, in particular they refer to three main categories of service: public transport, public street maintenance, and public healthcare service. The major concern was the functioning of different types of public services, especially the mal-functioning of public transportation. For example, the unreliable schedules caused challenges in respondents’ everyday lives.

A 44 -year old storeowner tells about her challenges using public buses and trains and her imaginary ideal experiences. In one instance, the respondent outlines the inefficiency of public transport.

“I am a Neapolitan storeowner, I cannot organize my work because of the many train delays, bus delays, subway delays and often I am forced to take a taxi with expenses out of my budget (Anna, 44, Naples).

Her ideal experience is about perfectly connected roads and enhanced service as the following illustration shows:

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“Streets would be perfectly connected, with adequate transport services, with more lines, more rides, better information. […] tables and billboards suited to understand the times and rides during the day. Faster construction of new subway lines, and better maintenance of old lines (Anna, 44, Naples).

Also another respondent had difficulties organizing his work due to poor public services:

“There was a delay of several minutes and I arrived late at night – then had problems to do my work” (Guido, 18-35,Naples)

His ideal experience is about more trains, no delays, improved punctuality:

“Greater focus, greater efficiency and quality. Trains on time, more controls, to have higher earnings, better punctuality” (Guido, 18-35,Naples)

Some other respondents refer to the fact that roads were not in good shape. A man in the age range of 51+ tells of his bad experience due to the poor streets maintenance, which caused accidents and even punctured his tyre:

“Once, after a storm, while I was driving the same stretch that I take every to the office, there was a hole hidden under a puddle of water that I went into, fully breaking the rim of my tyre. Of course I had to change the wheel in the first SOS area and this has led to a considerable delay in getting to work, a lot of stress and a certain fear caused not only by the unexpected blow, but also by the inability to quantify the damage. All this, of course under the effects of adverse weather conditions” (Claudio, 51+, Naples)

In his ideal experience he would like to have people who make their work honestly using high quality materials and innovative techniques in order to restore radically road surface.

“I would make a classification of all actions necessary to restore conditions of the streets. I would just like everyone carry their work honestly (Claudio, 51+, Naples)

Also another respondent refers to his bad experience due to poor street maintenance:

“There are consistently so many holes in the streets and roads that while driving I punctured the tire” (Antonio 26-35, Naples)”.

His ideal experience is to have unlimited funds to repair the streets:

“The funds at my disposal to improve city streets” (Antonio 26-35, Naples).

Some other respondents tell about inefficiencies in public healthcare service. For example, a middle-age woman complains about her experience in a healthcare center:

“I had a medical examination, there was a malfunction with the reservation system and I had to wait so long for my appointment.” (Simone, 51+, Naples)

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Her ideal experience is a more efficient service:

“ I would like that the service would be more efficient, that appointments would take place at the time that they were booked for … and also increase the quality of service as the tools available are inadequate and not technologically advanced”. (Simone, 51+, Naples)

While the narratives describe individual service experiences, many respondents emphasize their understanding of existing service culture being socially constructed. In the following extracts 24- and 35-year-old women, and a 51-year-old man open up the existing service cultures by referring to their friends and the notion of “we” or “everybody”.

“I, like other people, was waiting for a train. Only after 30 minutes we started to talk about the discomfort. During the first 30 minutes we thought it was the usual delay. (Alessia 24, Naples).

“One of the services that we use every day and that usually brings us a lot of inconvenience is public transport, namely the service offered by the Circumvesuviana (Neapolitan train) line”. (Marina, 35, Naples)

Also another respondent refers to the notion of “everybody” in the following extract:

“Surely everybody knows that every time we drive our vehicles to work or another destination we are confronted with a quite difficult reality in which protagonists are our streets.” (Claudio, 51+, Naples).

5. Discussion:

Our findings show that existing regional service culture creates the foundation for sense-making of value (1) of current service and value experiences, (2) expected service and value experiences, and (3) imaginary ideal service and value experiences.

First, our findings show that existing service culture affects how people make sense of their service experiences of using that service. While respondents in Naples experienced public service, and especially the malfunctioning of public transportation as challenges in their everyday lives, respondents in Helsinki experienced the non-friendly service encounters as challenges. Even if the cause for not-so-good value experiences was different in both countries studied, both Naples and Helsinki respondents were disappointed with the value of service. Even if these experiences were individual, respondents both in Naples and in Helsinki referred to socially constructed service culture experiences. Accordingly, existing service culture, and how customers interpret it, creates a platform for individual service and value experiences. We contribute to service experience and value research by presenting an empirical study of regional service, and extend experiential service experience and value experience research that has mainly focused on individual service experiences. We provide empirical narrative data on public service, which has gained little attention in service culture research. We draw on recent service research that has extended its interest for collective service experiences and value experiences

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(Jaakkola, Helkkula and Aarikka-Stenroos 2015) and research in consumer research focusing on co-consuming groups (Goulding et al. 2012; Carú and Cova 2015), especially for products, brands, consumer activities in brand communities (Schouten and McAlexander, 1995; Muñiz and O’Guinn, 2001; Cova et al., 2007).

Second, our findings show that existing service culture affects expected service experiences. For example, in relation to public transportation, the expected service experiences in Naples were very different from the expected experiences in Helsinki. While respondents in Naples had a pre-expectation of malfunctioning public transportation, respondents in Helsinki expected buses and trains to run on time. Accordingly, respondents in Naples expected buses and trains to be late or over-crowded, as in Helsinki a ten-minute-delay was considered to be a long delay and an unpleasant service and value experience.

In our study, we focus on the customer perspective as we study expected service experiences. The introduction of service economy as the foundation of business (Pine and Gilmore, 1999; Vargo and Lusch, 2008) has transferred the focus from service quality to service experiences and value experiences. We extend existing research on the Gaps-model, presented together with the SERVQUAL scale by Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry (1985) by focusing on service experiences and value experiences from the customer perspective. Accordingly, as the GAPS-model focuses on service quality, we address customer-experienced value. It has been shown that service quality affects customer satisfaction (Parasuranam et al., 1985; 1988; Howat and Murray, 2002). Quality has mostly been measured by standards, which are set by the service provider. Thus, quality does not measure a customer’s subjective experience of the service or value. Instead, quality measures how the standards set by the service provider have been reached. In organization studies, Kumar and Kumar (2015) indicate that in addition to organizations, also customers may be influenced by different cultures and different regional cultures in their expected and perceived service. Our research extends previous research by focusing on customer service and value experiences instead of quality; and by emphasizing that regional service culture may be an essential factor when customers make sense of their service and value experiences.

Third, the findings show that customers’ imaginary innovative ideas for an ideal service were strongly linked to the existing service culture. In Naples respondents imagined buses and trains running in time and not being too crowded to facilitate their everyday routines and actions. In Helsinki, imaginary ideal service experiences were related to better functioning of public transportation, as respondents’ expected experiences were based on the existing service culture of well-functioning public transportation. We draw on recent service research on imaginary service experiences (Helkkula, Kelleher, Pihlström, 2012; Jaakkola, Helkkula, Aarikka-Stenroos, 2015) and extend individual experiences to collective experiences of service culture. Our study therefore contributes to service research on experienced value by emphasizing service culture as socially constructed foundation for sense-making of both lived and imaginary value experiences.

To conclude, this is one of the first studies to focus on the cultural dimension of service experiences and its implication to value and expected service innovations. We contribute to service research, and especially to SDL, by drawing on CCT by extending individual experiences to collective experiences of service culture that

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creates a foundation for current service and value experiences, expected service and value experiences, and imaginary ideal service and value experiences. We argue that even if culture has received little attention in current service and value research, it opens avenues for understanding how customers make sense of their service and value experiences in relation to expected experiences, as well as their expectations and desires for future service experiences.

5.1. Implications

The study has implications for service researchers and managers when they plan to develop and innovate service. Both local and global service needs to adapt to existing service cultures and its historical, socio-material and cultural context (Gherardi, 2008).

Respondents’ service experiences indicate that existing service culture affects respondents’ expected service experiences and their imaginary experiences of an ideal service event. As service experiences are the foundation to making sense of value experiences, existing culture in service affects customers’ value experiences.

In case customers previously experienced mal-functioning service up to the extent that it has created a reputation for mal-functioning service culture, it affects customers’ value experiences.

5.2. The limitations of this study and future research

This study has focused on two empirical data sets on regional service cultures in Helsinki and Naples. Different regional service cultures offer a rich source of empirical data for future research. In addition to different types of regional service cultures, service cultures may relate to different consumer groups that may be geographically spread out and for example based on web-based interaction.

As sense-making of customers’ imaginary, expected service experiences for future service are affected by existing service culture, we encourage research in service development and service innovation to consider service culture as they involve customers in co-creation of innovative service ideas. Existing service culture may indicate customers’ expectations for improved service.

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