The Role of Emotions in Service Encounters

This article advances our understanding of the influence of affect in consumers’ responses to brief, nonpersonal service encounters. This study contributes to the services marketing literature by examining for mundane service transactions the impact of customer-displayed emotion and affect on assessments of the service encounter and the overall experience. Observational and perceptual data from customers were matched with frontline employees in 200 transaction-specific encounters. The results of this study suggest that consumers’ evaluations of the service encounter correlate highly with their displayed emotions during the interaction and postencounter mood states. Finally, the findings indicate that frontline employees’perceptions of the encounter are not aligned with those of their customers. The managerial implications of these findings are briefly discussed.

[1]  G. L. Shostack.  Breaking Free from Product Marketing , 1977 .

[2]  C. Schriesheim.  The Similarity of Individual Directed and Group Directed Leader Behavior Descriptions , 1979 .

[3]  P. Ekman,et al.  Facial Expressions of Emotion , 1979 .

[4]  B. Schneider.  Employee and Customer Perceptions of Service in Banks. , 1980 .

[5]  Daniel O. Segall,et al.  Understanding and Assessing Nonverbal Expressiveness: The Affective Communication Test. , 1980 .

[6]  É. Langeard,et al.  Services marketing : new insights from consumers and managers , 1981 .

[7]  G. Bower.  Mood and memory. , 1981, The American psychologist.

[8]  Thomas K. Srull,et al.  Affect and Memory: the Impact of Affective Reactions in Advertising on the Representation of Product Information in Memory , 1983 .

[9]  C. Lovelock.  Classifying Services to Gain Strategic Marketing Insights , 1983 .

[10]  G. Clore,et al.  Mood, misattribution, and judgments of well-being: Informative and directive functions of affective states. , 1983 .

[11]  C. Tavris.  On the wisdom of counting to ten: Personal and social dangers of anger expression. , 1984 .

[12]  Vandra L. Huber,et al.  Situational moderators of leader reward and punishment behaviors: fact or fiction? , 1984, Organizational behavior and human performance.

[13]  Gerald Mars,et al.  The world of waiters , 1984 .

[14]  John A. Czepiel,et al.  A role theory perspective on dyadic interactions: The service encounter. , 1985 .

[15]  Meryl P. Gardner,et al.  Mood States and Consumer Behavior: A Critical Review , 1985 .

[16]  B. Schneider,et al.  Employee and customer perceptions of service in banks: Replication and extension. , 1985 .

[17]  Anat Rafaeli,et al.  Expression of Emotion as Part of the Work Role , 1987 .

[18]  Paul E. Spector.  Method variance as an artifact in self-reported affect and perceptions at work: Myth or significant problem? , 1987 .

[19]  Rik Pieters,et al.  Functions and management of affect: Applications to economic behavior , 1988 .

[20]  R. I. Sutton,et al.  Untangling the Relationship between Displayed Emotions and Organizational Sales: The Case of Convenience Stores , 1988 .

[21]  J. Hollenbeck,et al.  Reclaiming Personality Traits for Personnel Selection: Self-Esteem as an Illustrative Case , 1988 .

[22]  Stephen W. Brown,et al.  Consumer and provider expectations and experiences in evaluating professional service quality , 1989 .

[23]  Kurt Kraiger,et al.  The influence of positive affective states on task perceptions and satisfaction , 1989 .

[24]  Anat Rafaeli,et al.  Busy stores and demanding customers: How do they affect the display of positive emotion? , 1990 .

[25]  Mary Jo Bitner,et al.  Evaluating service encounters: The effects of physical surroundings and employee responses. , 1990 .

[26]  John A. Czepiel.  Service encounters and service relationships: Implications for research , 1990 .

[27]  Mary Jo Bitner,et al.  The Service Encounter: Diagnosing Favorable and Unfavorable Incidents: , 1990 .

[28]  Madeline Johnson,et al.  Emotional Responses to a Professional Service Encounter , 1991 .

[29]  R. Fisk,et al.  The Service Experience As Theater , 1992 .

[30]  S. Kelley.  Developing Customer Orientation among Service Employees , 1992 .

[31]  Paul W. Miniard,et al.  Mood as a Determinant of Postconsumption Product Evaluations: Mood Effects and Their Dependency on the Affective Intensity of the Consumption Experience , 1992 .

[32]  M. Goldberg,et al.  Mood, Awareness, and Product Evaluation , 1993 .

[33]  S. J. Grove,et al.  Mood and the service customer: review and propositions , 1993 .

[34]  R. Oliver,et al.  Assessing the Dimensionality and Structure of the Consumption Experience: Evaluation, Feeling, and Satisfaction , 1993 .

[35]  J. Wagner,et al.  Percept-Percept Inflation in Microorganizational Research: An Investigation of Prevalence and Effect , 1994 .

[36]  Eric J. Arnould,et al.  Consumers’ emotional responses to service encounters , 1995 .

[37]  Stephen Fineman,et al.  Emotion in Organizations. , 1995 .

[38]  Glenn E. Nilson.  Emotion in Organizations , 1995 .

[39]  B. Parkinson.  Ideas and realities of emotion , 1995 .

[40]  Linda L. Price,et al.  Going to Extremes: Managing Service Encounters and Assessing Provider Performance , 1995 .

[41]  Banwari Mittal,et al.  The role of personalization in service encounters , 1996 .

[42]  R. Oliver.  Satisfaction: A Behavioral Perspective On The Consumer , 1996 .

[43]  Lance A. Bettencourt,et al.  Customization of the service experience: the role of the frontline employee , 1996 .

[44]  R. Jayanti,et al.  Affective responses towards service providers: implications for service encounter satisfaction. , 1996, Health marketing quarterly.

[45]  Eileen Fischer.  The sex of the service provider: Does it influence perceptions of service quality? , 1997 .

[46]  Janet R. Mccoll-Kennedy,et al.  Service provider training programs at odds with customer requirements in five‐star hotels , 1997 .

[47]  Ulrich Schimmack,et al.  Affect Intensity : Separating Intensity and Frequency in Repeatedly Measured Affect , 1997 .

[48]  K. Winsted,et al.  The service experience in two cultures: A behavioral perspective , 1997 .

[49]  William T. Ross,et al.  The Asymmetric Impact of Negative and Positive Attribute-Level Performance on Overall Satisfaction and Repurchase Intentions , 1998 .

[50]  Thomas R. Peterson,et al.  Effects of Self-Generated Facial Expressions on Mood , 1998 .

[51]  T. Brown,et al.  The Influence of Preencounter Affect on Satisfaction with an Anxiety-Provoking Service Encounter , 1999 .

[52]  P. Bentler,et al.  Cutoff criteria for fit indexes in covariance structure analysis : Conventional criteria versus new alternatives , 1999 .

[53]  S. J. Grove,et al.  Mood versus Service Quality Effects on Customers’ Responses to Service Organizations and Service Encounters , 1999 .

[54]  R. Rust,et al.  Should we delight the customer? , 2000 .

[55]  Janelle Barlow,et al.  Emotional Value: Creating Strong Bonds with Your Customers , 2000 .

[56]  E. Diener,et al.  Facets of Affective Experiences: A Framework for Investigations of Trait Affect , 2000 .

[57]  James G. Maxham,et al.  Corridors of Influence in the Dissemination of Customer-Oriented Strategy to Customer Contact Service Employees , 2000 .

[58]  Laurette Dubé,et al.  Ensuring greater satisfaction by engineering salesperson response to customer emotions , 2000 .

[59]  B. Schneider,et al.  Shaping Service Cultures Through Strategic Human Resource Management , 2000 .

[60]  R. Fisk,et al.  Interactive Services Marketing , 2000 .

[61]  H. Luomala,et al.  Contributions from mood research , 2000 .

[62]  Mary Jo Bitner,et al.  Technology infusion in service encounters , 2000 .

[63]  Raymond P. Fisk,et al.  Services as Theater: Guidelines and Implications , 2000 .

[64]  Martin Wetzels,et al.  What Makes Service Research Centers Effective? , 2001 .

[65]  S. Pugh,et al.  Service with a smile: Emotional contagion in the service encounter. , 2001 .

[66]  Jennifer S. Beer,et al.  Facial expression of emotion. , 2003 .