Service Employee Responses to Angry Customer Complaints
By C. Jerger, Jochen Wirtz. 2017
91 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Service employees’ emotional and behavioral responses to angry customer complaints were examined to help firms improve their service recovery performance. Role-played complaints were conducted in a field experiment set in fast-food restaurants. Actors played customers who complained in an angry fashion to service employees. Employees’ immediate emotional (i.e., expressed anger) and delayed behavioral responses (i.e., restitution offered) were observed. A follow-up scenario-based experimental study was used to retest the hypotheses and add controls to rule out potential rival explanations. In both studies, level of customer status (low vs. high; true experimental design) and strength of a restaurant’s service climate (weak vs. strong; quasi-experimental design) were manipulated. The findings confirm that employees in a weak service climate expressed more anger and were less likely to offer restitution to low- compared to high-status customers. In contrast, in a strong service climate, employee responses were less dependent on customer status and converged at a low level of anger and high probability of restitution offered. Furthermore, the consistent immediate affective and delayed behavioral responses suggest that a strong service climate is internalized by frontline employees. This study contributes to service theory by establishing a customer status main effect on both affective and conative employee responses and by confirming service climate as a boundary condition for the customer status main effect. A key implication for managers is that establishing a strong service climate is important for achieving effective service recovery in increasingly diverse societies.
Subfields: Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/99341687f1e9b9458d0664becf63e497dd177998
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In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management
In Sociology and Political Science
Citations in the corpus
- Effects of customer incivility on frontline employees and the moderating role of supervisor leadership style (2020, methodology): “3.2 Participants and procedures Following recent recommendations from the customer incivility literature (e.g., Albrecht et al., 2017; Jerger & Wirtz, 2017), we test these hypotheses using a scenario-based experimental approach.”