The service provider's service encounter holistic cyclical model

This is a conceptual paper that proposes a series of five models that show the cyclical process that service providers go through before, during and after a service encounter. Such ‘critical incidents’ are of great interest to marketers, but have not been researched extensively from a holistic perspective. The models identify the main variables that impact on the providers’ perceptions and behaviour in this cyclical process. The paper identifies future research directions and offers four hypotheses for testing.