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Introduction
Due to the increased awareness of health and wellness, fitness centers have become more prominent in the sector of sport services (Thompson, 2022). Before the outbreak of COVID-19, the global fitness industry had grown steadily, reaching nearly USD 100 million with over 64 million active members worldwide in 2019 (IHRSA, 2020). Compared to other sport services, fitness service is more interaction-based, consisting of multiple social exchanges, such as staff-customer interactions and customer-to-customer interactions (Lin, 2019; Vargo, 2021; Zolfagharian and Paswan, 2008). In particular, staff-customer interaction has become a critical element contributing to customers' service experience in the context of fitness services (Chelladurai and Chang, 2000). Moreover, it has been found that almost 90% of customers in fitness centers value their interactions with staff members, which influences patronage and membership renewal (IHRSA, 2018). In addition, pleasant customer interactions with the service provider create a hedonic experience for customers during the service delivery process (Zolfagharian and Paswan, 2008). However, it is noteworthy that the global fitness industry has been seriously hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to the social distance measures, service encounter in service encounter has been drastically changed (Chiu et al., 2021; Zhu et al., 2022; Thompson, 2022). Therefore, understanding customer-employee interactions in fitness services is of great interest for both academics and practitioners in the post-pandemic new normal.
In the context of fitness centers, services are produced and consumed by customers via encounters with employees (Chiu et al., 2020). Therefore, service encounter is arguably more critical for customers than other service industries due to the frequent interactions between service providers and customers (Lin, 2019; Hsieh and Chuang, 2020; Zolfagharian and Paswan, 2008; Chiu et al., 2014). Although the importance of customer interaction with fitness staff has been identified, the impact of service encounters on customers' perceptions and behaviors remains unclear (Glaveli et al., 2021; Kim and Byon, 2018). The existing literature lacks empirical evidence on the mechanism through which service encounters affect customers' perceptions and behaviors in the context of sport service. Given the uniqueness of fitness services and the research gap in the extant literature, this study focuses on the impact of service encounter on consumers' perceptions and behaviors in fitness centers to address the research gap...