Satisfaction and Dissatisfaction in Service Encounters : Retail Stockbrokerage and Corporate Banking in Thailand

Purpose – The purpose of the paper is to examine customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction with interpersonal vs internet service encounters in Thai retail stockbrokerage and corporate banking.Design/Methodology/Approach – In each of two separate projects, in-depth qualitative interviews were used to develop industry-specific survey instruments that covered the same dissatisfaction conceptual structure. The stockbrokerage survey had 460 usable questionnaires from retail customers, and the corporate banking survey resulted in 152 usable questionnaires.Findings – Results in each case show that customers actually have slightly higher satisfaction on the internet than with interpersonal encounters, but dissatisfaction on the internet is much greater. The net is that they still largely view the interpersonal mode as superior.Research Limitations/Implications – The paper shows that Thailand is a highly personal relationship oriented business culture. The results are probably most directly representative of other Asian cultures.Practical Implications – Gaining widespread acceptance of internet services among customers seems more a problem of eliminating dissatisfaction, rather than fostering satisfaction.Originality/Value – This is one of the few papers to show with strong empirical data that customers view satisfaction and dissatisfaction as distinct dimensions. An additional contribution is demonstrating that dissatisfaction can be measured with industry specific scales, which are nevertheless comparable across industries