Bad Intentions: Customers’ Negative Reactions to Intentional Failures and Mitigating Conditions

Abstract

Intentional service failures (e.g., overbooking or overcharging) have received little scholarly attention, despite their regular occurrence and immense costs. Using a multi-method approach combining experimental and field data from online reviews, it was found that intentional (vs. unintentional) failures lead to greater negative word of mouth (nWOM) and patronage reduction. This research extends these findings by demonstrating that intentional failures are less harmful when the failure is reversible (vs. irreversible) and occurs at an employee (vs. firm) level. Further, while either psychological (e.g., apology) or monetary compensation is effective in mitigating the consequences of intentional failures at an employee level, a combined service recovery (psychological and monetary) is the best solution when the failure is at a firm level. Drawing on attribution theory, the article unveils the key role of trust (as opposed to justice) as the mechanism to explain the effects of intentionality on customers’ nWOM and patronage reduction.

High Expectations: How Tourists Cope With Disappointing Vacation Experiences

“…Prior research finds that agent locus attribution results in more negativities such as dissatisfaction, discrete negative emotions, and demands for compensation than situation locus (Drewery and McCarville 2022; Majerczyk, Owens, and Waddoups 2020). Agent/provider locus is also found to contribute more toward disappointment (Majerczyk, Owens, and Waddoups 2020; Pacheco, Becker, and Brei 2017), and to consequently have behavioral ramifications (Nazifi et al 2021; Um and Kim 2018). It is thus expected that attribution of the negative experience to an agent (e.g., the service provider) will make the discrepancy between expectations and the actual outcome more salient and consequently will make it more likely that the consumer will display coping behaviors.…”

“…Finally, we also consider locus attribution. This is a consumption cue that especially emerges when consumers search “why this happened to me.” It has been studied extensively in the broader business and marketing literature (Coleman and Williams 2013; Köcher and Paluch 2019) while recent tourism research also established the relationship between locus attribution and general and discrete negative emotions (Drewery and McCarville 2022; Matikiti, Roberts-Lombard, and Mpinganjira 2019), repurchase intentions (Kim, So, and Mihalik 2022) and behaviors (Nazifi et al 2021; Um and Kim 2018). In a recent review, Koc (2019) finds attribution to be one of the least studied fields in service failure and tourism contexts and only a few tourism studies explore the role of locus of attribution in generating disappointment (Demeter, Walters, and Mair 2021; Mattila and Ro 2008).…”

“…For a variety of reasons, customer expectations are unlikely to always be met in tourism as negative incidents are inevitable (Mattila and Ro 2008; Migacz, Zou, and Petrick 2018). It is also well established that not meeting expectations can lead to damaging coping outcomes such as cancellations, diminished repeat visitation and also negative word-of-mouth (nWOM) (Nazifi et al 2021; Um and Kim 2018). Positive and negative coping behaviors, along with their different motives and varieties (Duhachek 2005; Gelbrich 2010), have however received relatively little attention by tourism researchers.…”

Impact of praise cashback strategy: Implications for consumers and e‐businesses

“…Cashback strategies can also compensate dissatisfied consumers and affect their postpurchase behaviors. For example, in terms of service failures, merchants engage in service‐recovery strategies to enhance recovery satisfaction and reduce negative online reviews (Nazifi et al., 2022); however, this kind of ex post cashback strategy generates strategic behaviors and fake negative reviews (Salehi‐Esfahani & Ozturk, 2018). As a typical cashback strategy, a PCS also leads to strategic consumers and causes fake negative reviews.…”

The demand-what-you-want strategy to service recovery: achieving high customer satisfaction with low service failure compensation using anchoring and precision effects

“…Future research should JSTP 33,7 also address how the anchoring and precision effects are modulated by customer individual differences and contextual factors, which were not addressed in the current study. For example, future research could address failure intentionality, failure globality and failure reversibility (Nazifi et al, 2022) in the context of the demand-what-you-want-strategy to further explore the effects of situational factors.…”