Den serviceanställdes användande av humor, charm och flirt i kundmötet
Abstract This essay is written to answer the questions of why, how and against who employees in the service sector use humour, charm and flirt in the interaction with their customers. The service management research is quite extensive, but despite this the research partly misses studies around why employees tend to act in certain ways while interacting with their customers. To understand the reasons of why they act in these particular ways, we need to know which factors that can be crucial when it comes to the employees? behaviour in these situations. By knowing the underlying reasons of using a special way to communicate with customers, it is much easier to achieve a clearer overview of the subject. That is why we also have studied if the employees tend to act different the moment they start the daily work, by taking on a mask or play a role. Of course many factors can play a ruling role in this quite wide concept, and that is why we have delimited the study to contain what we believe is the most important and revealing research within the service management discourse.To get to this understanding we formulated some questions to answer. These questions are the following. Why does service employees use humour, charm and flirt in the customer interaction?In which ways does the use of humour, charm and flirt show?Against whom does service employees use humour, charm and flirt?Is there a connection between the concepts humour, charm and flirt?By interviewing employees within the service sector we came to the conclusion that they use humour, charm and flirt to create a pleasant atmosphere for the customer. The employees also mentioned that it is more fun to work in a positive atmosphere. The use of humour, charm and flirt was mostly described as something that was adapted to every single customer. That means that the use humour, charm and flirt could imply several different things as for example joking, being rude in a friendly way and it could sometimes even mean verbally flirting, but in a friendly way, with regulars. The employees? use of humour, charm or flirt was explained as something that was applied on many customer, depending on the judgement that was made by the employee based on what signals the customer sends out. Finally, by exploring the concepts, we found that there is an explicit connection between them. You are able to see a quite clear connection between humour and charm as well as between charm and flirt, since charm tended to be an extension of both these concepts. Humour and flirt where also connected since for example one employee described flirt as something that was only used with regulars. The conclusion of this is that employees in these matters only flirt with people they know and with people they therefore can assume do not take it the wrong way.