1School of Business, BRAC University.
2Business Administration, East West University.
3Centre for Policy Research and Social Responsibility.
The purpose of the study is to evaluate critical service encounter or the critical moment of truth and the customer behavior in the case of bus services in Dhaka City, Bangladesh. The scope of the study is the frontline employees of different transport (bus) service industries of Dhaka City. Data were collected using the critical incident technique (CIT), through structured, open-ended questionnaires. The results were then content analyzed to examine employee's perspective of critical service encounters of bus service. The research was conducted over 50 sample units (employees of different bus service provider) using the convenience sampling technique. Finally, the qualitative data was put into quantitative analyses. The most notable finding of this research is that problematic customers are the root cause for mass dissatisfaction. Then employee response to service delivery system failures, employee response to customer needs and requests and finally, unprompted and unsolicited employee actions are respectively the critical factor for the dissatisfaction for the user of the bus service in Bangladesh. In conclusion, it can be concluded that both the behaviour of the problematic customers as well as employee response to customer needs and requests are the primary challenges for the transport (bus) industry and these issues need to be addressed carefully.
