Providing Excellent Consumer Service Is Therapeutic: Insights from an Implicit Association Neuromarketing Study.

Gemma Anne Calvert,Abhishek Pathak,Eamon Philip Fulcher,Geraldine Trufil,Lim Elison Ai Ching

doi:10.3390/bs9100109

Gemma Anne Calvert, Abhishek Pathak + Show 3 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/bs9100109

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Abstract

This paper reports the results of a combined biometric and implicit affective priming study of the emotional consequences of being the provider or receiver of either positive or negative customer service experiences. The study was conducted in two stages. Study 1 captured the moment-by-moment implicit emotional and physiological responses associated with receiving and providing good customer service. Study 2 employed an affective priming task to evaluate the implicit associations with good and poor customer service in a large sample of 1200 respondents across three Western countries. Our results show that both giving and receiving good customer service was perceived as pleasurable (Study 1) and at the same time, was implicitly associated with positive feelings (Study 2). The authors discuss the implications of the research for service providers in terms of the impact of these interactions on employee wellbeing, staff retention rates and customer satisfaction.

Highlights

Customer satisfaction is a vital goal for all businesses because it leads to increased sales and customer re-patronage, which boosts profits
In the study, we sought to extend these findings by investigating the implicit emotional feelings associated with both positive, as well as negative, customer service interactions in a larger population using a web-based implicit affective priming task designed to uncover the strength of emotional association that people hold about positive and negative customer service interactions
The results focus on the comparison of emotional attributes that were both significantly associated with providing versus receiving positive and negative customer service, as well as the overall number of positive and negative emotions attributed to each condition

Summary

Introduction

Customer satisfaction is a vital goal for all businesses because it leads to increased sales and customer re-patronage, which boosts profits. Techniques that have emerged from the fields of neuroscience and psychology, such as functional MRI, electroencephalography (EEG), eye-tracking, biometrics, facial decoding and implicit association testing, have been engaged by brand owners to capture these vital subconscious responses in order to define and predict consumer behaviour with much greater accuracy (for a recent review, see [9]). This approach has been referred to as “neuromarketing” [26] and numerous commercial practitioners of this burgeoning industry exist. Commercial adaptations of these paradigms permit marketers to capture these vital subconscious consumer responses online, without the need for verbal feedback or even respondents’ awareness of their reactions

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