Friendliness, Helpfulness and Respectfulness: The Effect of Employee Attributes on Customer Satisfaction

Abstract

This study investigates the main and interactive effects of 3 employee attributes, namely friendliness, helpfulness and respectfulness in the Chinese banking industry. It offers a new perspective of integrating the Chinese cultural artifacts into the interpretation of meployee attributes effect at a service encounter, which initate the topic of communication of respect or the effect of culture specific lelments in service marketing. A 2 x 2 x 2 between-subjects experimental design was performed to test 5 hypotheses. It is found that the effect of respectfulness has the strongest impact on customer satisfaction. The effect of friendliness is also contingent to the level of helpfulness and the effect of helpfulness is significantly higher when respectfulness is high. It shows evidence that it is important to establish customer-orientation standards and policies as well as employee training programs design,especially considering the culture influence in service relations.