Discrete Negative Emotions and Customer Dissatisfaction Responses in a Casual Restaurant Setting [Summary]

The current study has several practical implications for hospitality organizations. First, the results suggest that different negative emotions may lead to different behavioral intentions. Angry customers, in particular, can be very harmful to the firm, as they are determined to act on the failure with various confrontive coping behaviors. Rather than trying to forget the incident, angry customers are likely to engage in face-to-face complaining, switch to another company, or spread negative WOM about the service provider. Although the study did not include third-party actions in this study, angry customers might also engage in third party complaining, such as writing letters to newspapers or taking legal actions (Bougie et al., 2003). Moreover, the findings suggest that it is difficult to soothe angry customers with a simple correction (e.g., replace the wrong order) and an apology. Although such recovery efforts might be adequate to mitigate the impact of disappointment on postrecovery satisfaction, more effortful recovery strategies are needed to win back angry customers. In such situations, restaurants need to consider high correction strategies, such as offering free food, discounts, and/or managerial intervention (Hoffman et al., 1995; Susskind, 2005). The finding further suggests that hospitality organizations might want to invest in training their customer-contact employees to decode customers’ emotional cues.

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