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Published in:
2020 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
A Moment of Influence: Understanding the Customer Experience after Receiving a Penalty: An Abstract
Authors : Mary P. Harrison, Sharon Beatty
Published in: Marketing Opportunities and Challenges in a Changing Global Marketplace
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
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Abstract
The focus on building a superior experience throughout a customer’s journey has become a top goal for service providers (Lemon and Verhoef 2016). It is important to understand the customer experience over numerous touch points and across multiple interactions. On the research agenda from the authors’ Journal of Marketing article is to “identify anomalies in customer journeys—whereby customers deviate from habit or predictions—and identify potential moments of influence” (p. 87).
One such anomaly explored here is the case of a customer making a mistake during the service experience resulting in a penalty or fine. All services require some customer participation (Bitner et al. 1997), and providers are asking more from customers during the service experience than ever before (Dong and Sivakumar 2017). Customers are frequently error-prone (Chase and Stewart 1994) and cause one-third of all service problems (Tax et al. 2006).
In order to understand the customer experience after a penalty, a critical incident technique study with a content analysis was conducted. There were 126 critical incidents after cleaning the data. Participants were asked “Can you think of a time when you made a mistake that led to a penalty? (Or you almost got a penalty but the company waived it?).” Participants were asked a series of questions, depending on whether they were charged a penalty or the company waived the penalty.
Fifty-nine percent of the sample asked for a waiver after receiving a penalty due to a mistake. In terms of retention, 43% of the individuals who asked for a waiver and did not receive it left the company. None of the participants who asked for a waiver and received the waiver left the company.
Forty-one percent of the participants did not ask for a penalty waiver. Twenty-one percent of these individuals left the company. Service providers must carefully consider the outcomes of denying penalty waivers, and how the refusal to grant the waiver affects the customer’s overall experience with the firm. Firms should be as flexible as possible, considering each customer’s individual situation. These findings set the framework for a series of scenario-based experiments.