Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to investigate how and why other-customer misbehavior has a negative influence on customer satisfaction with the service firm. Design/methodology/approach -Data for this study were gathered by retrospective experience sampling. Findings -There are several important findings that can be obtained from the results. First, people consider another customer's failure to be the firm's responsibility when they perceive that the failure is under the firm's volitional control (i.e. controllability attribution). This controllability attribution leads to customer expectations of compensation for recovery from dissatisfaction. Second, stability attributions about other-customer failures were not found to be significantly related to the firm's responsibility. Third, the severity of the other-customer failure experience bears no relation to the customer's service recovery expectation, but it is negatively related to satisfaction. Finally, the customer's evaluation of service is not only affected by the other-customer misbehavior, but also by how employees react to situations when other customers are unruly or potentially disruptive. Practical implications -Providing employees with the appropriate coping and problem-solving skills for working with problem customers is a key issue for service providers. More importantly, employees should be trained to help the affected customers, to alleviate any bad feelings caused by the other-customer's misbehavior. Originality/value -The paper suggests that employees in a service-providing firm may need to act as "police officers" to ensure that all their customers behave appropriately.
The purpose of this study is to determine which attribution dimensions concerning dysfunctional other-customer misbehavior most influence customer dissatisfaction toward a service firm. Our research hypotheses were tested using a 2 (Controllability: controllable versus uncontrollable) x 2 (Stability: unstable versus stable) x 2 (Globality: specific versus global) experimental design in a hypothetical restaurant context. Our empirical results demonstrate that when customers feel that the other-customer's misbehavior can be controlled by the firm (i.e., controllability attributions) or is likely to recur (i.e., stability attributions), they render unfavorable service evaluations toward that firm. However, these harmful effects may be mitigated if the customer believes that the same type of dysfunctional customer behavior also occurs during service encounters in other firms (i.e., globality attributions). With a view to diminishing the unsatisfactory experience of other-customer failure, the service organizations need to: (1) act as "police officers" to ensure that their customers behave appropriately; (2) have policies and procedures in place to manage their guests' behavior so as to reduce the recurrence of other-customer failure; and (3) consider communications intended to enhance attributions of globality following an other-customer failure, that will help to buffer the negative impact of controllability and stability attributions on satisfaction and behavioral reactions with the firm. This is the first time that controllability, stability, and globality attributions are clearly shown to be part of the process by which customers transfer their negative response to other-customer misbehavior to the organization
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