Customer emotions in service failure and recovery encounters

Emotions play a significant role in the workplace, and considerable attention has been given to the study of employee emotions. Customers also play a central function in organizations, but much less is known about customer emotions. This chapter reviews the growing literature on customer emotions in employee–customer interfaces with a focus on service failure and recovery encounters, where emotions are heightened. It highlights emerging themes and key findings, addresses the measurement, modeling, and management of customer emotions, and identifies future research streams. Attention is given to emotional contagion, relationships between affective and cognitive processes, customer anger, customer rage, and individual differences

“I love it” or “I hate it”? The positivity effect in stated preferences for agent evaluation

Consumers often interact with agents to obtain advice about products and services. A consumer’s evaluation of an agent as a source of personalized advice depends, in part, on the extent to which the consumer believes the agent knows and shares her tastes. In this research, we show a positivity effect in the agent evaluation process, whereby consumers perceive alternatives they love (compared to hate) to be more informative to agents about their tastes, and hence more diagnostic to agents for predicting their future evaluations. Further, we show that this positivity effect is moderated by the agent’s level of agreement with the consumer, and is driven by the greater accessibility of information about loved, compared to hated, alternatives. We discuss the implications of these results for interpersonal judgments and agent choice. Copyright Springer Science + Business Media, Inc. 2006Agent, Preference, Similarity, Word-of-mouth,