Extant literature has, to date, focused almost entirely on the use of interpersonal buyer-seller interactions during the process of creating service outcomes. This paper aims to fill this void by contributing to extant knowledge on customer interactions with technology-based self-service delivery options. The extent to which technological interface that enables customers to produce a service independent of a direct service employee involvement is used by hotels of various categories in France is, thus highlighted in this paper. It is, however, assumed in this paper that there can be significant dissimilarities in the response time when using e-mails to communicate with customers. These dissimilarities are investigated on the basis of an e-mailing action that encompasses sending a typical room-booking request to French hotels. Exhaustive samples of 240 hotels spread out in 120 cities located in France constituted the target group. One-way ANOVA testing differences between means was used to assess the impact of the hotel category (independent variable) on response time (dependent variable) among hotels in France. Our findings found significant dissimilarity in responsiveness across hotels categories. The implication of the findings for management is basically the fact that responsiveness is most likely the first step in providing good quality technology-based buyer-seller interactions to create service outcomes using the Internet/e-mail. One of the major concepts in customer relationship management is speed at which firms respond to questions and problems during the service encounter.

Keywords: information and communication technology (ICT), Buyer-seller interactions, Internet/e-mail, technology-based self-service delivery options, responsiveness.