Study On The Structure And Measurement Of Customer Interaction Perception In The Context Of Services Based On Interaction Ritual Chains Theory

Production and consumption at the same time is the basic characteristics of services andservice transactions often involve an interaction between service recipients and service providers.So service interaction management has great effects on cultivating customer relationship，improving business performance， and keeping sustainable competitive advantage for serviceenterprises. But the problem of how customer perceives service interaction and how to definecustomer perception interaction has not been better resolved by scholars and practitioners.Based on Collins’s theory “interaction ritual chains”， this paper explored the content andstructure of customer perception interaction in the context of services; then，through empiricalresearch on the medium-contact and high-contact service industries in Guangzhou， wedeveloped the scale of customer perception interaction in the context of services and it isconfirmed that the customer interaction perception covers the following three dimensions:interaction willingness， interaction skills and interaction emotion. Interaction willingnessdemonstrated the willingness of the service enterprise interacts with customers and providesopportunities and interactive platform to interact with customers. Interaction skills refer to theservice professional showed by service personnel in interacting with customer. Interactionemotion refers to the stable emotional connection between customer and service enterprise whichresulting from their emotional consequential reached a high concentration through interactingwith each other. At the last of the paper，we described the applications of the results in servicemarketing，and concluded the study limitations and future research directions.