A Neurophysiological Assessment of Consumers’ Emotional Responses to Service Recovery Behaviors

Service marketers are particularly interested in consumers’ emotional response to service failure and recovery. However, efforts to measure emotional responses in these types of situations by means of post-encounter, self-report measures are far from satisfactory. In this study a neurophysiological approach is used to measure consumers’ emotional responses during a service encounter. This approach enables one to assess the impact that the physical features (ethnicity and gender) of service providers can have on consumers’ emotional responses to service recovery efforts throughout an entire service recovery interaction. It emerges that consumer responses to service recovery are characterized by both neutral (not statistically different from the baseline) and negative emotional responses as the service encounter unfolds. Individuals with high similarity to the service provider (in terms of gender and ethnicity) exhibit significantly more negative emotional responses than those with low similarity. However traditional measures of post-encounter satisfaction show no differences between high similarity and low similarity and consumers report fairly positive evaluations of the encounter. This discrepancy suggests that, in a situation where social desirability bias may play a role, consumers may exhibit negative emotional responses but may not report these negative responses. The results suggest a need to reconsider social identity theory and similarity-attraction theory in a service recovery situation because physical similarity between service provider and customer leads to significant negative emotional responses. Managerially, frontline service employees should be trained to ensure adequate sensitivity to potentially negative responses when the complainant is of the same gender and ethnicity as the service provider.