Service provider responses to anxious and angry customers: different challenges, different payoffs

Abstract

Anxiety and anger, two frequently experienced emotions during service consumption, arise from different appraisals of the eliciting event, i.e., attribution to uncontrollable circumstances and low coping potential for anxiety versus attribution to providers and high coping potential for anger. These appraisal differences were hypothesized to impact the occurrence of supportive provider responses (higher for anxiety than for anger), and the value given to supportive responses by anxious versus angry customers (higher evaluation for anxiety than for anger). It was also hypothesized that, although evaluation of provider response would mediate the relationship between the intensity of both anger and anxiety and satisfaction with the service encounter as a whole, the power of this mediating effect would be stronger for anxiety than for anger. Hypotheses were confirmed in a survey of air travel passengers reporting episodes of anxiety and anger. Implications of these results for challenges and payoffs involved in the development of adaptive response strategies to anxious and angry customers are discussed.