MEASURING CONSUMER EMOTIONS IN SERVICE ENCOUNTERS: AN EXPLORATORY ANALYSIS

Consider the range of emotions that make up the experience of life, emotions such as love, anger, excitement and joy. Yet by all accounts there is only one emotion that we experience as consumers, satisfaction. Customer satisfaction is the second most measured index in Australian business after net profit (James, 1997), and of course no one would argue that trying to achieve customer satisfaction is what we are all about. Customer satisfaction is one of those terms that is so ubiquitous however, that we rarely stop to consider what the word actually means, especially when we can ‘measure’ it so easily with commonly used Likert type rating scales. Recently however there have been a number of criticisms of satisfaction rating measures. Peterson & Wilson (1992) address the inherent skewness of satisfaction rating distributions; Iacobucci, Grayson & Ostrom (1994) question the received wisdom of exceeding customer expectations; Jones & Sasser, (1995) in an article in the Harvard Business Review discuss why “satisfied” customers defect; and Stewart, (1997) argues that “a satisfied customer isn’t enough”. This paper presents the results from an ongoing empirical study by the author into consumer emotions. By focusing on the service encounter specifically, it argues for the need to move beyond the satisfaction construct as a measure of the consumer experience.