Resumo

Service quality is seen as one of the main attributes in the satisfaction of restaurant consumers, with the menu and the environment, especially where the behavior of waiters and waitresses directly impacts the experience and customers' evaluation.

Also considering the scarcity of research related to the topic, this study seeks to understand in more depth the importance and the impact that the behavior of the service team has on the satisfaction of consumers of casual-dining restaurants in the city of São Paulo, with focus on evaluation of the functional and personal aspects of employees' behavior. The research objectives are to evaluate if personal or functional aspects are more important in this experience, and which of the two have more influence on satisfaction.

There are some types of attributes that are considered depending on the ease or difficulty of evaluating the service before the acquisition occurs, which are the search attributes, experience attributes and credibility attributes (Zeithaml, 1981; Wirtz, Hemzo, Lovelock, 2020). For restaurants (Liu, Jang, 2009), the perceived quality in the restaurants is basically tied the tripod: the quality of food, quality of service and quality of the atmosphere of the service environment.

In addition to in-depth interviews having been conducted to explore aspects of service that is considered important to consumers, a survey was conducted with a sample of 359 respondents whose frequented casual-dining restaurants at least once a month.The resulting database was analyzed in SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) version 21. Descriptive statistics, factor analysis and multiple regression were used to analyze the hypotheses. Cronbach's α was also used to test the reliability of the used scales.

For the analysis of qualitative data was possible to understand what are the factors considered important as a satisfying restaurant experience: fair service, good service, quality food and a warm and clean environment. In Quantitative analysis, functional and personal aspects of the service team have direct impact on the consumer perception of quality of service. The KMO test (Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin), a statistical procedure that allows to measure the quality of correlations between the variables. resulted equal to 0.925, what can be considered "very good" (Pestana, Gageiro, 2003).

The results of the data analysis showed that the functional and personal aspects of the service team are important in consumer satisfaction, however, the personal aspects were more relevant than functional aspects. Thus, cordiality and hospitality, respect for customer privacy, ability to communicate, friendliness, attendance to special requests from the client, in addition to clean and tidy uniforms, are the aspects most appreciated by consumers.

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