Serving the Senior Target Market
Vassiliki Grougiou, School of Economics and Business Administration, International Hellenic University, Thessaloniki, Greece, and Simone Pettigrew, Health Promotion Evaluation Unit, University of Western Australia, Crawley WA, Australia, published “Senior Customers’ Service Encounter Preferences” on October 13, 2011 in the Journal of Service Research. To view other OnlineFirst articles, please click here. Dr. Grougiou kindly provided the following responses to the article.
Who is the target audience for this article?
Researchers and managers who want to understand senior customers’ service encounter needs.
What inspired you to be interested in this topic?
Growing segment size and increasing affluence have resulted in a substantial increase in the purchasing power of the senior market. While seniors spend a higher proportion of their total expenditure on services relative to younger consumers, there is still limited attention given to their needs and wants. This warrants further research into the area.
Were there findings that were surprising to you?
The findings that were most surprising were the impact of life events on senior customers’ service encounter needs, especially how personal misfortunes could impact seniors’ service encounter expectations. Nostalgia for past working practices and objections over current working practices were not expected but were mentioned by the interviewees.
How do you see this study influencing future research and/or practice?
This research will encourage further research on seniors’ service encounter needs and the importance of life events on service encounter preferences and satisfaction.
How does this study fit into your body of work/line of research?
This study responds to my research area of senior customers’ consumer behavior. It stresses the importance of life events in shaping senior customers’ needs and their impact upon customers’ overall satisfaction.
How did your paper change during the review process?
We would like to express our sincere gratitude to the three anonymous reviewers and editors’ constructive comments that managed to refine our empirical model and provide deeper analyses of our findings where necessary.
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