The role of cognition and affect in the formation of customer satisfaction judgements concerning service recovery encounters

Abstract

It is widely accepted that justice perceptions play an important role in shaping customers' evaluations of service recovery experiences. However, this stream of justice research has evolved with little cross-reference to emotion research. The current paper seeks to address this issue by explicitly considering the role of perceived justice in the elicitation of recovery-specific consumer emotions. Specifically, we develop and test a model suggesting that perceived justice represents a cognitive appraisal dimension, which helps to explain the elicitation of positive and negative emotions during and/or after service recovery encounters. Furthermore, we argue that customer satisfaction with service recovery (i.e. recovery satisfaction) is based partly on cognitive (i.e. perceived justice based) and partly on affective responses. Support for the proposed model is provided through findings from an empirical study showing that both cognitive and affective influences work to create the recovery satisfaction judgement. This finding has significant implications for the theory and practice of service recovery management.

An analysis of the interaction effect between employee technical and emotional competencies in emotionally charged service encounters

“…(1) Enraged (2) Angry (3) Disgusted (4) Mad Satisfaction with the employee response (adapted from Schoefer, 2008;Tax et al, 1998) (1) The handling of the encounter was done as well as it should have been.…”

A Meta-Analysis of Organizational Complaint Handling and Customer Responses

“…Tax, Brown, and Chandrashekaran (1998) and Kau and Loh (2006) place trust in the same position as behavioral intentions, whereas Kim, Kim, and Kim (2009) consider trust to be a partial mediator between post-complaint satisfaction and behavioral intentions. In a similar vein, del Río-Lanza, Vázquez-Casielles, and Díaz-Martín (2009) and Schoefer (2008) consider emotions as antecedents of post-complaint Gelbrich and Roschksatisfaction, whereas DeWitt, Nguyen, and Marshall (2008) and Chebat and Slusarczyk (2005) use emotions, in lieu of post-complaint satisfaction, as mediators between justice perceptions and behavioral intentions.…”

Organisational Complaint Management

“…This successful complaint handling might turn these previously dissatisfied customers to very satisfied customers due to the exemplary behaviour on the company's part. This post-complaint satisfaction level might even be higher before the service incident, because the customers experience individual problem resolution and therefore regain trust and positive emotions in the relationship with the company (Schoefer 2008). This phenomenon is called the recovery paradox (e.g.…”