Customer Affective Responses Research Articles

To wait or not to wait: effect of apologies and explanations on customer call abandonment

ABSTRACT Research on wait management has almost exclusively focused on customer affective response, trying to mitigate their negative emotions. As such, prior studies appear to be motivated by the assumption that encouraging customers to quit the wait is not an option. Our study challenges this assumption by proposing that during peak hours or for customers who are unlikely to get served within a reasonable time frame, the firm should consider applying tactics to skillfully guide them to quit the wait. We examine the effects of apologies and explanations on customer emotional and behavioral responses to waiting in a telephone queue setting. In two field studies and two lab studies, we find that apologies with a high-control explanation (which indicates that the firm has a high degree of control over the situation) versus a low-control explanation, result in greater attribution of locus to the service provider. In turn, this leads to greater customer call abandonment but, crucially, will not generate additional negative emotions from customers. Our study offers a new research angle by incorporating an operational perspective into customer experience management. Our findings can be applied to help service providers better manage the flow of customer calls while avoiding negative customer sentiments.

Does stress matter in mall experience and customer satisfaction?

PurposeThis paper aims to demonstrate that stress is a relevant feeling to take into account in mall experience and customer satisfaction management. Furthermore, it is proposed that its effects on mall experience and satisfaction differ depending on shopping motivation and frequency.Design/methodology/approachThe method is based on seemingly unrelated regressions models and data were obtained through a survey of 1,088 mall clients. Mall experience is addressed through customer cognitive and affective responses. Both terms together with stress and customer satisfaction with the mall are constructs measured by seven-point Likert scales. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were conducted to validate these measures.FindingsThe results show that stress reduces customers’ affective response and satisfaction. The effect of low levels of stress on customer affective response is less negative for frequent shoppers, and the influence of high levels on satisfaction is less negative for them. Furthermore, stress has a U-shaped effect on customers’ cognitive response, an effect that is reduced for frequent shoppers.Practical implicationsMall managers should try to reduce stress in the management of their customers’ experience. Moreover, they should increase the shopping frequency of their clients by implementing marketing strategies, such as frequency programs and serial concerts, and assist shoppers in reorganizing their shopping goals by implementing organizing tools and new recommendations and suggestions.Originality/valueGiven that previous work on shopping stress is scarce, this paper expands the extant literature by analyzing its effects on mall experience and customer satisfaction. Furthermore, it shows that these effects may vary depending on shopping frequency and motivation.

Mapping Customer Delight by Using a Surprise Model

Marketing is full of vivacious thoughts and surprises. Marketers are exploring the thought of creating surprises to achieve a competitive advantage in the business market. The customers are key stakeholders in any business. The present study tested a model containing surprises and 10 antecedents creating customer delight. The study was conducted with a motivation to find out an avenue of creating surprises leading to a variety of delight outcomes. The present study tried to classify customer affective responses in three broad categories as low, moderate, and high. Differences in categories were checked for the purpose of basic classification, and discriminant function analysis was conducted for identifying predictor surprise variables discriminating power for such classification. The results of the study confirmed the key role of add-on features, humor, schema discrepancy, and perceived firm expertise in deciding the classification. For marketing insights, the profile of each category was designed by using vector diagrams. Store environment and product appearance were found to be relatively important predictor vector variables on the basis of magnitude calculation. The present study would be useful for the marketers in taking the decisions related to products and promotions for creating delightful customers.

The Impact of Different Touchpoints on Brand Consideration

Marketers face the challenge of resource allocation across a range of touchpoints. Hence understanding their relative impact is important, but previous research tends to examine brand advertising, retailer touchpoints, word-of-mouth, and traditional earned touchpoints separately. This article presents an approach to understanding the relative impact of multiple touchpoints. It exemplifies this approach with six touchpoint types: brand advertising, retailer advertising, in-store communications, word-of-mouth, peer observation (seeing other customers), and traditional earned media such as editorial. Using the real-time experience tracking (RET) method by which respondents report on touchpoints by contemporaneous text message, the impact of touchpoints on change in brand consideration is studied in four consumer categories: electrical goods, technology products, mobile handsets, and soft drinks. Both touchpoint frequency and touchpoint positivity, the valence of the customer's affective response to the touchpoint, are modeled. While relative touchpoint effects vary somewhat by category, a pooled model suggests the positivity of in-store communication is in general more influential than that of other touchpoints including brand advertising. An almost entirely neglected touchpoint, peer observation, is consistently significant. Overall, findings evidence the relative impact of retailers, social effects and third party endorsement in addition to brand advertising. Touchpoint positivity adds explanatory power to the prediction of change in consideration as compared with touchpoint frequency alone. This suggests the importance of methods that track touchpoint perceptual response as well as frequency, to complement current analytic approaches such as media mix modeling based on media spend or exposure alone.

Mechanism of customer value in restaurant consumption: Employee hospitality and entertainment cues as boundary conditions

Food quality and employee task performance have been demonstrated to positively influence customer evaluations of restaurant dining experience. This study extends previous research by incorporating customer affective responses to examine the mediating processes underlying the relationships between customer perceptions of task performance/food quality and perceived value. The moderating influences of employee hospitality and entertainment cues on the relationships between customer perceptions of task performance/food quality and their affective responses were also examined. Results from surveying 308 customers of full-service restaurants showed that customer affective responses mediate the relationships between task performance/food quality and perceived value. The results also indicated that the relationship between food quality and affective responses increases with employee hospitability. However, employee hospitability negatively moderates the relationship between task performance and affective responses. Additionally, strong entertainment cues positively reinforce the relationship between task performance and affective responses, but do not significantly affect the relationship between food quality and affective responses.

Stimulating designers' creativity based on a creative evolutionary system and collective intelligence in product design

In the field of industry design, the affective response characteristic can plays a significant role that could grasp customer's attention in product. Especially, the design strategy of “affection-prerequisite” shows the importance of the trend of customer-oriented for the industry products. Up to date, in consideration of the rapidly life-cycle on industrial design field, however, how designers can retrieve customer's affective response promptly and using such information into their design work efficiently are significant, but not discussed yet. Based on this concept, the objective of this research is to present a creative stimulation system for designers. The “wisdom of crowds” was collected via the Web in order to ascertain customers' affective responses to product shapes. This data was used to create an evolutionary design system platform by using a design alternatives generation mechanism. The study involved integrating an interactive genetic algorithm into the mechanism to generate an interactive creative stimulation system. An affective design of the shape of a mobile phone was used as an example of implementation and also used as a proof of the research concept. Relevance to industry HIGA and ESC methods proposed in this research provide the usage of the affective evaluation system for acquiring the customers' affective responses in the conceptual design process of a mobile phone. This design-generation process allows the design stakeholders to realize their customers' affective responses interactively with sharing floating data among them according to the daily update of customer's evaluations.

A Measurement of Emotional Intelligence in Service Encounters

The concept of Emotional Intelligence appears to be able to provide the premise to describe customer aptitude in managing emotions elicited in a service exchange, as well as provide the precedential link to understand customer affective responses. However, given that research in the commercial implications of emotional intelligence has focused predominantly in management literature, no widely accepted scale has yet been developed to assess implications of customer's emotional intelligence in a service context. This paper outlines the development of a new measure, the Customer Emotional Intelligence Scale (CEIS), an adaptation of the Workplace Emotional Intelligence Profile version 3 (WEIP-3) which was designed to profile the emotional intelligence of customers in the context of service encounters. Empirical investigation conducted in the context of service industry supported multidimensionality of the CEIS. Discussion in this paper focuses on the application of the scale in services marketing while outlining avenues for future research.