Customer behavioural intention: Influence of service delivery failures and perceived value in Malay restaurants - Theory and Practice in Hospitality and Tourism Research - page 392

(2008) further noted that Malay restaurants were
criticized of providing poor service delivery such
as lack of service quality, poor service encounters,
and poor employee interaction with customers. In
turn, many Malay restaurants found to be unable
to sustain their business operations for over a long
period. Othman et al. (2009) argued that Malay res-
taurants are continuing to develop rapidly but are
still having problems in terms of service delivery
failures, particularly in waiting times for food to be
delivered to the customers. For this study, Malay
restaurant is characterize as restaurants that offer
Malay meals at a medium price that customers per-
ceive as “good value”, with full service, buffets or
limited service with customers ordering at the table
and having their food brought to them.
Despite of repeated service delivery failures
occurring in Malay restaurants, it is presumed that
service recovery applied to apprehend the situa-
tion are not effectively executed or not even imple-
mented at all. Thus, it is interesting to find out the
underlying factors that still influenced customer to
remain and loyal by patronizing the same Malay
restaurants. Chen and Hu (2010) postulate that
despite experiencing the service failure customers
are still patronizing a particular restaurant due to
specific values which is valuable to them. In other
words, the role of perceived values which relate to
experience or special values like price, location,
food, ambience and few others might contribute to
this causation (Chen & Hu, 2010). Although, this
notion is made from a different restaurant setting,
it is predicted that customers of the ethnic res-
taurants which in the context of this study Malay
restaurant might have the same attitudes. It is there-
fore imperative to venture and further engross-
ing the issues and confirming the entire proposed
dimension, especially in the medium class Malay
restaurants in Malaysia. Thus, this study intends to
examine the factors of service delivery failure, per-
ceived values and behavioural intention in Malay
restaurants in Malaysia and hypotheses that;
H 1 : There is a significant relationship between serv-
ice failure and customer behavioural Intention
H 2 : Perceived value mediates the relationship between
service delivery failure and customer satisfaction

highlighted that most successful restaurants com-
pete on the basis of their ability to deliver superior
and unexceptional service. Nevertheless, even in the
luxurious restaurant with the best customer-oriented
strategic plans, immaculate service delivery cannot be
assured (Chiang, 2007). A restaurant, which involves
a great amount of personal interaction between the
staff and customers even, cannot avoid day-to-day
errors, silly mistakes, unprecedented failures, as well
as complaints in the process of service delivery. Serv-
ice delivery failures, in fact, can make restaurants out
of business by neglecting the cause of failure.
The initial work by Bitner, Booms and Tetreault
(1990) introduce the examination of service failures
through critical incident technique (CIT) classi-
fied failures into three broad groups: (1) employee
responses to delivery system failures, (2) employee
responses to customer needs or requests, and (3)
unprompted and unsolicited employee actions.
Even though, there exist many sub-categories to the
aforementioned three groups that may be opera-
tional in nature, the three classes effectively indicate
that failures usually link to customer evaluations of
interaction with some aspect of the service organiza-
tion. Service delivery failures occurred when service
delivery performance does not meet the expectations
of customers and can be classified as either pertain-
ing to the outcome or the process (Smith, Bolton &
Wagner, 1999). Smith (2007) highlighted that a
process failure happened when the core service car-
ried in a flawed or incomplete way, resulting in poor
benefit to the customer such as status or esteem.
Conversely, an outcome failure happens when a cer-
tain feature of the main service is not carried, insti-
gating in the reduction of economic resources such
as money and time to the customer.
Knowing failures will occur even in the finest
restaurant, it is imperative therefore for the restau-
rant to make provisions for the recovery of these
unfavorable instances and the provisions that a res-
taurant makes are known as service recovery. An
organization's ability to recover from failure is an
essential element of the whole service delivery sys-
tem with significant implications on customer sat-
isfaction (Church & Newman, 2000). Duffy (1998)
stated that service recovery provides opportunities
to decrease costs, the improve customer experience,
and increase customer satisfaction. When custom-
ers are satisfied, they are more inclined to exhibit
positive behavior toward the service provider
(Kristen, 2008). It is no surprise that the satisfied
customers are truly invaluable to an organization.
Despite providing recovery in response of service
delivery failures, customers' intention to repatronize
restaurants may also improve by having some values
that may have some effect to the restaurant custom-
ers (Oh, Kim & Shin, 2004; Chen & Hu, 2010). Chen
and Hu (2010) describes customer perceive values

2 LITERATURE

2.1 The connection between service delivery
failures, service recovery, perceived value and
behaviour intention
Undeniable that to be successful, restaurant indus-
try must have the ability to deliver satisfying expe-
riences to customers. Kong and Jogaratnam (2007)