Behavioral biases in the service encounter: empowerment by default?

Discusses the findings of a study in which 309 service encounters between customers and customer‐contact personnel in service businesses and retail stores were unobtrusively observed, to measure the occurrence of selected service behaviors (i.e. mostly interpersonal behaviors such as smiling, thanking customer, establishing eye contact, etc.), and to investigate possible behavioral biases. On average, only 72 percent of the measured behaviors were observed in each service encounter. Employees’ behaviors were generally less likely to be observed when served customers were male, young, caucasian, or casually dressed. The propensity of frontline workers to systematically discriminate against some types of customers on bases that have little or nothing to do with customers’ service requirements represents a downside of employee discretion dubbed as “empowerment by default”.