2016 5th IIAI International Congress on Advanced Applied Informatics
Evaluating the Benefits of Consumer Revisitation
Intentions for Restaurants in Taiwan
Chung-Te, Ting
Tourism, Food & Beverage Management
Chang Jung Christian University
Tainan, Taiwan
e-mail: ctting@mail.cjcu.edu.tw
Szu-Chin, Pan
Tourism, Food & Beverage Management
Chang Jung Christian University
Tainan, Taiwan
e-mail: panjr1966@mail.cjcu.edu.tw
Abstract—When people waits for an extending time in a
restaurant, the restaurant must take an appropriate action to
recovery it to reduce consumers’ dissatisfaction and negative
oral spreading in order to bring back consumers and reduce
loss of customers. The contingent behavior analysis (CBA) is
used for establishing the revisit benefit of the restaurant
waiting service, which is used for analyzing factors and
benefits affecting people’s revisit demand under the service
recovery and improvement plans “increase service quality” and
“improve restaurant facilities and add technical equipment”.
The research result shows different service recovery and
improvement plans significantly increase the benefit of people
revisiting restaurants. The plan about improvement of software
and hardware facilities of restaurants brings the highest
benefit. Respondents about the restaurant revisit demands have
no price elasticity under implementation of different recovery
plans.
Keywords—CBA, Service Recovery, Waiting, Revisitation
I. Introduction
People stand in a line for food is a unique
phenomenon for Chinese society. “popular keywords
about food: queuing, limit, food” published by “Common
Wealth Magazine” clearly and simply describe the fact
that people must stand in a line and wait for food, which
indicates that “wait” is regarded as one of the main trends
in current food culture, implicating that product or service
has an important symbolic significance and attraction. The
mental expectation in “wait” usually can give awarded
marks to food in the world of food and overturn the
stereotype of modern people about “time is money”.
“Waiting” is a common consumer experience, and
more than 70% consumers will pay attention to the issue
of wait [1]. People often have an acceptable waiting time
978-1-4673-8985-3/16 $31.00 © 2016 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/IIAI-AAI.2016.139
Yu-Sheng, Huang
Tourism, Food & Beverage Management
Chang Jung Christian University
Tainan, Taiwan
e-mail: yshuang@mail.cjcu.edu.tw
Cheng-Te, Lin
Business Administration
Kang Ning University
Tainan, Taiwan
e-mail: scsbte@ukn.edu.tw
that will affect satisfaction [2]. As long as consumers are
concerned, wait is a negative experience, which not only
will affect the intention that consumers spend again, but
also will increase consumers’ total cost [2], [3]. In terms
of people running restaurants, they must increase
consumers’ feelings toward restaurant service quality.
When consumers begin to wait, it represents consumers
really begin to receive services [4]. The waiting process is
part of the service quality, but if owners’ actions make
consumers to stand in a line for a long time, people will
view it as a waste of time.
II. Waiting Phenomenon
Generally when services cannot meet consumers’
demands, it will cause consumer dissatisfaction and
1
service failure , which will indirectly affect the
relationship between consumer satisfaction and loyalty [5].
From the point of restaurant owners, developing new
guests is truly one of the indispensable market strategies,
but the way about how to keep the previous loyal guests is
the important concept and strategy of sustainable
operation. Even if the operating strategy is excellent, it
will result in service failure. Appropriate service recovery
actions must be taken to bring back consumers and reduce
loss of customers.
The study uses restaurant wait as the object of study
and discusses if the implementation of service recovery
actions of restaurant wait can increase the benefit that
people revisit restaurants. Therefore, the study will use the
contingent behavior analysis (CBA) to observe the benefit
that people’s revisit under different service recovery
situations.
III. Result and Conclusion
1. Sample and descriptive statistics
The study uses consumers waiting for a table as the
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object of study. The site visit was formally executed on
holidays from July to August 2015. It mainly used
restaurants in Tainan as the sampling object, and stated
and delivered the meaning presented by the questionnaire.
Totally 596 questionnaires were officially issued. 583
questionnaires were got in total, excluding 13 invalid
questionnaires.
In the aspect of the descriptive statistics, respondents’
social and economic backgrounds are as below. 319
people are female (54.7%); people at the age of 31-40 are
in the majority (31.4%), followed by people at the age of
21-30 (29.2%) and 41-50 (22.8%); service industry is in
the majority (31.9%) as for the occupation distribution;
NT$ 2-40,000 (incl.) are in the majority as for the
individual average monthly income, followed by NT$
4-60,000 (incl.) (25.4%).
About the restaurant waiting service improvement,
most of respondents think there is a room for improving
the restaurant waiting process (69.0%), of which
“restaurant facilities” (24.8%) and “technical service
equipment” (21.7%) are the main items.
2. Evaluation of restaurant revisiting benefit
From the questionnaires, we find that the average
number of times before and after executing the “increase
restaurant service quality” is respectively 1.86
times/person and 3.43 times/person. Therefore, under the
quality improvement plan, CS before execution is NT$
7,481/person, and CS will increase to NT$13,795/person
after execution.
It has a significant difference at 1% level, which
indicates the plan on waiting quality improvement will
increase the restaurant revisit benefit. In a similar way, the
average number of times before and after executing
related software and hardware equipment such as
“improve restaurant facilities and increase technical
service equipment” is respectively 1.86 times/person and
3.77 times/person.
Therefore, under the quality improvement plan, CS
before execution is NT$ 5,866/person, and CS will
increase to NT$11,890/person after execution. It has a
significant difference at 1% level, which indicates the plan
on waiting quality improvement will increase the
restaurant revisit benefit.
3. Conclusion
Revisit benefit of the plan on service recovery and
improvement: the execution of “increase restaurant
service quality” and “improve restaurant facilities and
increase technical service equipment” respectively
increase the benefit of people going to restaurant to 85%
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and 103%, of which the improving effect about the plan
“improve restaurant facilities and increase technical
service equipment” exceeds doubled. This echoes the
situation reflected by most of respondents, i.e.,
incompleteness of restaurant software and hardware
facilities, including planning of waiting area, good
queuing route, and buying related electronic queuing
system and developing APP for immediate query.
Therefore, it can be used as the future operating strategy
of the restaurant owners or the reference direction of
buying equipment.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
We thank the Ministry of Science and Technology
(MOST) of the R.O.C. for funding this study.(MOST
103-2410-H-309012)
It is helpful to the future researchers in promotion
and research of food and farming education, and timely
provides a reference for the promotion of food and
farming education by the government and the owner’s
local consumption products.
REFERENCES
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managing response time in hospitality operations”
International Journal of Operations & Production
Management, 14(5), 52-58, 1994.
[2] S. Taylor, “Waiting for service: the relationship
between delays and evaluations of service,”
Journal of Marketing, 58(2), 56-69, 1994.
[3] P. Kotler, Marketing Management: Analysis,
Planning and Control, Implementation. Eleventh
Edition, 2003.
[4] R. C. Ford, M. C. Sturman, and C. P. Heaton,
Managing quality service in hospitality. Demar
cengage learing, 2012.
[5] Y. S. Wang, S.C. Wu, H.H. Lin, and Y. Y. Wang,
“The relationship of service failure severity, service
recovery justice and perceived switching costs with
customer loyalty in the context of e-tailing,”
International Journal of Information Management, 31,
350-359, 2011.