Negative affective states in customers’ service experience : investigating antecedents and mitigations

Abstract

Previous research has provided various insights into the potential benefits and competitive advantages of customer participation (Bendapudi and Leone 2003). For instance, customer participation can lower production costs and improve productivity (Lovelock and Young 1979; Mills and Morris 1986), service quality, customer satisfaction (Bendapudi and Leone 2003; Chan et al. 2010; Dong et al. 2015), and opportunities for promotion (Bettencourt 1997). Hence, many companies create a new customer experience by making the customer a co-creator of value (Ramaswamy and Gouillart 2010). However, observing people trying to print their own luggage tags and checking in at an airport or assembling IKEA furniture reveals emotions that are not always positive. Customers appear to be overtaxed, irritated, unhappy, and distressed. This phenomenon is especially relevant for services that are crucial for customers and that cause them to feel some kind of pressure (e.g., time), that are hard to understand, or are in any way upsetting. For instance, in one of their studies, Berry et al. (2015) found that patients in hospitals experienced such stress due to the service process and newspapers often also report on the problem of customers feeling helpless at banks (Adamu 2015). Attributable to the growing number of tasks that customers have to fulfill, yet, they are not driven by failures in the process but by stressors within the service process. Such stressors could arise from industry-specific knowledge that customers often do not have (e.g., financial expertise), the high relevance of the service to a customer’s life (e.g., medical services), or high time pressure (e.g., the need to catch a flight). However, organizations might not be aware of such stressors, and research about negative emotions, particularly stress due to physical and mental overload and strain in customer participation, is lacking. Service organizations, however, might benefit from such research, as managers must be aware of potential stressors and the possibility that customers could become stressed due to the characteristics of the service itself. Greater knowledge in this area would enable managers to respond to customer stress appropriately, e.g., by altering the service design or process and by training their employees to intervene when necessary. This thesis seeks to fill in this gap within two empirical studies (chapter 2 and 3). As a means of investigating negative customer emotions in services with flawless delivery, customer participation stress (CPS) is introduced as a new construct to service marketing research. The definition of CPS builds on established definitions of stress from general and organizational psychology and links them to the behavioral aspects of customer participation. While CPS is a negative emotion that occurs within the service process, some services are affected by negative emotions that have already emerged before the actual service encounter and/or are the initial reason the customer has come to the service provider. These services, such as medical or funeral services, can be summarized as negative services (Dasu and Rao 1999; Morgan and Rao 2006). It might be a challenge for service organizations to actively engage customers in such services, yet their professional reputations are vital to their ability to remain in business; methods of how such service providers may increase customer engagement are outlined in chapter 3. While previous studies have presented valuable insights into positive emotions in the customer experience, negative emotions due to service failure, and the service process of negative services, research to date has not covered knowledge about negative customer emotions in flawless customer experiences with a focus on jointly created value of employee and customer and a comprehensive definition and boundaries of negative services. This thesis seeks to fill in these gaps with three distinct but related studies, two quantitative and one conceptual; answering to the following research questions: 1. Which demands and resources of the participation process cause CPS and how does CPS influence customer participation behavior? 2. What are the consequences of CPS and how do they influence customers’ evaluation of a service? 3. How can the characteristics of the participation process and customers’ predispositions mitigate unwanted psycho-physical and behavioral outcomes of CPS? 4. What characterizes negative services and how can providers of such service be more successful by engaging customers?

In der bisherigen Forschung haben zahlreiche Studien gezeigt, dass Kundenintegration im Dienstleistungssektor positive Auswirkungen hat, darunter bspw. eine höhere Servicequalität und eine Erhöhung der Kundenzufriedenheit. Im Gegensatz dazu haben die negativen Aspekte der Kundenintegration bisher wenig Beachtung in der Forschung wie auch in der Unternehmenspraxis gefunden. Die Dissertation umfasst zwei Beiträge, die Einflussfaktoren und Auswirkungen von Kundenintegrationsstress untersuchen und Möglichkeiten aufzeigen, die unerwünschten Auswirkungen von Kundenintegrationsstress zu reduzieren. Ein dritter Beitrag befasst sich mit negativen Dienstleistungen, welche für den Kunden bereits vor Inanspruchnahme der Leistung mit negativen Emotionen verknüpft sind.