Critical incidents in the gaming industry : perceptions of guests and employees

Critical Incidents in the Gaming Industry: Perceptions of Guests and Employees by Lesley Jeanne Johnson Dr. John T. Bowen Committee Chair Professor o f Hotel Administration University of Nevada, Las Vegas During the service encounter or “moment of truth” the customer judges the quality of the service organization. Not all guest-employee service encounters, however, are equally important. For every organization there are probably particular service encounters that are critical to customer satisfaction. Before they can initiate efforts to service their customers, service firms must first identify and manage critical service encounters. Using the environment of the gaming industry, this exploratory research investigated the concept of identifying and evaluating critical service encounters from the perspectives of both guests and customer-contact employees and measured the level of congruence/incongruence between the two parties involved in the service interaction. The study also examined the applicability of the critical incident classification scheme of Bhner, Booms, and Tetreault (1990) to the gaming industry. Using the critical incident technique, slot customers and slot department employees of a major Las Vegas strip hotel/casino were interviewed using the same set of open-ended questions. Slot customers and employees were asked to recall both particularly satisfactory and dissatisfactory service events that had transpired at the study hotel/casino or another hotel/casino. Employees were asked to recall incidents in the manner in which they felt dieir customers perceived the incidents. The model and decision tree of Bimer, Booms, and Tetereault (1990) was used to code the recalled incidents. Two judges completed the