Towards a great good place on campus

3 October 2022

Establishing branded retail services on university campuses offers enhanced service experiences for the student population. It serves as an additional revenue stream for the universities. Apart from commercial reasons, the growing retail presence on campus seems to reflect the importance of the "Third Place", as suggested by Oldenburg (1989) in his book The Great Good Place, where he advocates that "third places" such as cafes and coffeehouses are the hearts of a community's social vitality.

“While the "first places" refers to isolated homes and "second places" refer to workplaces, the "third places" offer a neutral public space for a community to relax, connect and establish bonds. In the context of university students today, the "first place" may refer to their residence, the "second place" relates to the classrooms where students need to "labour" in the academic assessments or materials, and the "third place" refers to the café and restaurants where they "chill out" and socialise. Such retail services provide a psychological sense of community which leads to positive emotional experiences,” shared Dr Chong Yit Sean from the School of Business, Monash University Malaysia.

According to Dr Chong, the growing retail presence in universities highlights the need for service quality management to consider customers' perceptions based on core service and peripheral service attributes. While there has been growing attention to service quality research in the higher education and retail sectors, these studies are mainly carried out within their restricted context.

“Therefore, this study explores the carryover effect of customers' emotional states from a core service (academic delivery) to a peripheral service context, a global café chain on a university campus. As the 'carry-over effect' of emotions has yet to be given sufficient attention, it potentially offers an insightful contribution to the extant literature and managerial practices. This research seeks to explore the role of emotions in service evaluation, particularly when these emotions are carried over from unrelated service encounters. This inquiry is important as it allows us to understand the dynamics of customer satisfaction ratings, which are commonly used in the service sector,” Dr Chong stated.

Findings from the field experiments involving approximately 300 undergraduate students demonstrate that students' feelings over their grades affect the retail service quality perception. Dr Chong emphasised that those who felt sad over the grade attained during the experiment felt uplifted at the café, which also led to the highest satisfaction rating at the café. Those who felt happy over their grade sustained this emotion in the retail setting and reported relatively high satisfaction scores.

On the other hand, participants who felt neutral over the grade attained reported the lowest satisfaction rating at the café. This study highlights the importance of considering customer emotions and potential carryover effects while reviewing service satisfaction ratings, mainly when these measures are used for staff appraisal in the academic context or retail operations. This is more salient in complex service industries such as higher education and healthcare sectors where service outcome (e.g. grades attained or surgery/treatment outcome) is hard to control.

“Essentially, this study also calls for a re-imagination of the role of universities beyond academic rigour to encompass the well-being of the campus community as we navigate the transitional phases of the pandemic. The atmospherics, ambience and warm receptions of the university facilities (including learning spaces) provide therapeutic or stimulating effects to students (and staff) towards reflective and creative endeavours. Among other imperatives, a holistic approach to higher education service delivery contributes to the development of thriving and productive human capital that empowers the progress of our society,” Dr Chong concluded.

This project will benefit stakeholders such as students, retail operators and higher education institutions.