واگرایی زبان در مواجهه با سرویس: بازخوانی تاثیر آن بر بازاریابی دهان به دهان  Language divergence in service encounters: Revisiting its influence on word-of-mouth

1. Introduction As more than half of the world’s population can speak in more than one language, accommodating customers’ language requirements plays a significant role in their evaluation of service encounters and service providers. Van Vaerenbergh and Holmqvist (2014) demonstrate that serving bilingual customers in their second language may lead to them evaluating the service provider as less responsive, which may reduce their intentions to spread positive word-of-mouth about the service provider. This is an important finding, as language serves as a principle vehicle for customer identity and facilitates effective interaction with a service provider. Understanding two important issues will provide a greater understanding of the mechanism by which language divergence affects positive word-of-mouth. First, interaction quality, a key element of interpersonal interaction between a customer and a service provider, encompasses informational, emotional, and behavioral aspects (Brady & Cronin, 2001; Lu, Zhang, & Wang, 2009). Van Vaerenbergh and Holmqvist (2014) consider only the behavioral aspect of perceived employee responsiveness. Second, when customers receive service in their second language, they perceive the service provider as dissimilar (Duffy & Ferrier, 2003), potentially leading to a disparaging evaluation of the service provider. In other words, language divergence may adversely affect the quality of the buyer-seller relationship. The original study does not consider the role of language divergence in determining the quality of buyer-seller relationships. Against this background, this study replicates the work of Van Vaerenbergh and Holmqvist (2014) with substantial conceptual and methodological differences which further test the propositions of the original article and provide additional insights for the role of language accommodation in service encounters. First, as replication leads to extension of the scope of the results and ensures managerial relevance (Hubbard, Vetter, & Little, 1998), this study tests the applicability of language divergence in a different service context, as well as in a different national context. Specifically, this study examines the role of language divergence using banking services in the Malaysian context, providing further insights into the generalizability of the original work’s results and subsequent practical applicability (Easley, Madden, & Dunn, 2000).