Interactional service failures in a pseudorelationship: The role of organizational attributions

Abstract

The current research investigates customer responses to interactional service failures, such as a service provider who is rude or inattentive, or unfriendly. We study interactional failures within pseudorelationships, which exist when a customer interacts repeatedly with the same firm but encounters different employees across service occasions. Empirical results demonstrate that customers’ responses to these interactional failures distinguish between the offending employee and the organization. Dissatisfaction with the organization critically depends on the customer's attribution of globality—how widespread the interactional failure is throughout the organization. Globality attributions and dissatisfaction with the organization can be lowered by excellent past experience with the organization; however, that same positive experience increases dissatisfaction with the offending employee. Thus, customers’ discrimination of the organization and employee in a pseudorelationship can work in the organization's favor after an interactional failure, and managing customers’ attributions of globality should be a managerial priority.

Introduction

“I have used Airline (X) quite a lot because of the Buddy Plan which they offer once in a while ….

I have got to tell you this story though, it quite surprised me. I took a trip to California to visit my sister and decided I would stay a while longer …. I called the airline to change it to a later date, which they did for a $75 fee, which I was told to pay at the airport before I boarded the flight home. When we arrived at the airport to go home, my transaction was not on their records and they refused to let me board …. There were no seats left. Of course, I was annoyed and voiced my opinion but I was rebuffed and treated very rudely by one of their staff. Because of this, I asked to speak to his superior and was ignored. I eventually found someone on my own. Even he was rude saying that I would have to wait for another flight and that was that. No apologies whatsoever!!!

I like the service they provide but I was treated like a burden, a time waster. I did get home on the next flight and if I had been treated kindlier; it probably wouldn’t have bothered me so much. This happened only once. I had never had any problems before but it only takes one experience like that to change your mind about which airline to use.” (42english, an Airline X customer on Epinions.com)

This very public complaint from an irate customer shows the damage that can be done by a single interactional failure; that is, a failure caused by the manner in which frontline employees treat the customer (e.g., being rude, inattentive, or unfriendly). Despite his past satisfaction with the airline, the customer hints at a possible exit from the relationship—stressing not the problem with the core service (i.e., the promised flight) but the indifference and rudeness of employees during the interaction. Interactional failures are both frequent and potentially fatal to customer relationships, accounting for 32% of the causes of unsatisfactory service (Bitner et al. 1990b) and 34% of the factors leading to customer switching (Keaveney 1995).³ However, few empirical studies of interactional failures exist (Bitner 1990a; Folkes and Patrick 2003; Smith et al. 1999), and given the frequency and damaging consequences of interactional failures more research is clearly warranted.

Customers often cite interactional failures when they lament the erosion of service standards. One putative cause of this deterioration is that service has become more impersonal, often occurring in a context in which the service employee and customer are unacquainted and may interact for a single encounter only. Gutek et al. (1999) refer to this situation as a service pseudorelationship, in which a customer interacts with different frontline employees across encounters with a service organization. A pseudorelationship is common with large organizations that have multiple locations and high employee turnover (e.g., airlines, franchise restaurants, mail order firms, or hotel chains). In contrast, a true service relationship develops when the customer repeatedly interacts with the same employee(s) across time (e.g., hair stylist or a physician). Thus, an interactional failure in a pseudorelationship may involve a previously unknown employee that the customer will not encounter again. As a result, customers may identify that offending employee less closely with the organization in a pseudorelationship than they would in a true relationship.

The impersonality of pseudorelationships and the arguably weaker connections between individual employees and the organization make pseudorelationships an important context in which to examine interactional failures. By definition, interactional failures are unambiguously caused by the behavior of specific employees. If these offending employees are as individuals less central to the (pseudo)relationship between the customer and the organization, then it is important to know to what extent a negative response to the offending employee generalizes to the organization. In this paper we study interactional failures in pseudorelationships and assess their effects on customer satisfaction with both the offending employee and the service organization.

Our research makes several key contributions. First, it extends existing research on service failures by examining customers’ responses to interactional failures in the context of a pseudorelationship. As argued above, when individual employees are somewhat less critical to the customer's experience with the organization, as in a pseudorelationship, responses to an offending employee and the service organization may diverge. In the current research we model and test for this differential response to employee and organization and the antecedents of each.

Second, we demonstrate that attributions of globality (along with controllability) are central to dissatisfaction with the organization after an interactional failure. Globality attributions are the extent to which observers perceive that the cause of an event generalizes across settings, as opposed to being situation-specific (Abramson et al. 1978). Although the importance of attributions after service failure is well established in general (Folkes 1984; Folkes et al. 1987), the concept of globality has until recently been overlooked in a marketing context⁴ (Folkes and Patrick 2003; Matta and Folkes 2005).

Third, we establish that a customer's past service experience influences the attributions of globality after an interactional failure. Favorable past experience has been shown to mitigate the negative effects of a failure or poor recovery from a failure (Anderson and Sullivan 1993; Bolton and Drew, 1991a, Bolton and Drew, 1991b; Hess et al. 2003; Maxham and Netemeyer 2002; Tax et al. 1998; Zeithaml et al. 1996). By demonstrating the effect of past experience on attributions of globality, we identify an additional mechanism by which past interactions can buffer an organization from the effects of a service failure.

Fourth, we show that interactional service failures which account for customer dissatisfaction with the organization are distinct from those that cause dissatisfaction with the employee. We find that customers’ attributions of globality and organizational controllability affect the generalization of their dissatisfaction with a frontline employee to the service organization. We now define some fundamental concepts within the model.