The effect of customers' emotional responses to service failures on their recovery effort evaluations and satisfaction judgments

By Amy K. Smith, Ruth N. Bolton. 2002

925 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This study examines the role of customer emotions in the context of service failure and recovery encounters. It investigates how customers' emotional responses to service failures influence their satisfaction judgments after accounting for cognitive antecedents of satisfaction. The study also considers how customers' emotional responses to service failures influence how they evaluate an organization's recovery efforts. The research is conducted by surveying customers about their satisfaction judgments in two service settings, restaurants and hotels. The results suggest that customers' emotional responses to service failures will influence their recovery effort evaluations and satisfaction judgments in some circumstances and that the effects of emotion vary across industry settings. This study identifies the types of efforts that are most effective in helping customers “recover” from the negative emotions caused by service failures.

Subfields: Marketing, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e5e75d6b67898e013de8e173788e71e26fa6aee4

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In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

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Citations in the corpus

How emotions mediate the effects of perceived justice on loyalty in service recovery situations: an empirical study (2005, neutral): “This is the ‘‘no-cost action’’, as Smith et al. (1999) put it.”
Festivals as agents for behaviour change: A study of food festival engagement and subsequent food choices (2015, background): “Emotions are “the primary motivational system for human beings” (Izard, 1977, p. 3), however it has been noted that they lack universal definition (Smith & Bolton, 2002).”
Satisfaction with service recovery: Perceived justice and emotional responses (2009, background): “Several authors stress that consumers' emotions during SR encounters influence their SSR (Menon and Dubé, 2004; Schoefer and Ennew, 2005; Smith and Bolton, 2002).”
Affective responses to service failure: Anger, regret, and retaliatory versus conciliatory responses (2007, background): “For example, Smith and Bolton (2002) examine how negative emotional responses to a service failure influence how consumers evaluate an organization’s recovery efforts.”
The effect of service failure types and service recovery on customer satisfaction: a mental accounting perspective (2012, background): “…effects on customer satisfaction (e.g. Choi & Mattila, 2008; McColl-Kennedy, Daus, & Sparks, 2003; Spreng, Harrell, & Mackoy, 1995), and applications of the attribution theory (e.g. Choi & Mattila, 2008; Wirtz & Mattila, 2004) and justice theory (e.g. Smith & Bolton, 2002; Smith et al., 1999).”
The influence of emotions on customer's cognitive evaluations and satisfaction in a service failure and recovery context (2008, background): “…Nyer, 1999), only a few relatively recent studies of service failure and recovery have taken emotions into consideration (Andreassen, 2000; Bougie, Pieters, & Zeelenberg, 2003; Chebat & Slusarcyk, 2005; Menon & Dubé, 2004; Schoefer & Ennew, 2005; Smith & Bolton, 2002; Zeelenberg & Pieters, 2004).”
Predicting overall customer satisfaction: Big data evidence from hotel online textual reviews (2019, background): “posed to direct measures, can avoid eliciting customers’ perceptions (Smith and Bolton, 2002).”
Effect of Nutrition Information in Perceptions of Food Quality, Consumption Behavior and Purchase Intentions (2004, background): “Two survey questions asked participants to rate their expectations and disappointment-both measures of expectation (Bitner, Booms, & Tetreault, 1990; Smith & Bolton, 2002).”