Service Design of Franchise and Independent Japanese Restaurants in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Japanese food culture has recently become more popular in Vietnam. To be successful, Japanese restaurants need to satisfy increasingly sophisticated and demanding customers, by designing the required service components to create the customer’s overall experiential journey effectively. Therefore, the service design process in Japanese restaurants, which aims to improve tangibility attributes and service delivery to delight customers by exceeding their expectations, could be considered a necessary research issue. There has been relatively little research on service design in the Vietnamese hospitality industry, especially in the restaurant industry. Moreover, the different service design applications between franchised and self-owned businesses has not been investigated previously. Thus, this paper explores the restaurant owners’ or managers’ self-assessment of business advantages and disadvantages, their perceptions of service design, and its application in the daily operation of Japanese franchise and independent restaurants in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Based on extant literature, the major service design-related aspects examined in this paper are service process, product features, and the physical environment. The researcher conducts in-depth interviews with managers from six Japanese restaurants. The study results enable existing or potential Japanese restaurants with scarce resources to apply service design effectively and efficiently to improve business success.