There\u27s a fly in my soup : the influence of service guarantees and personal requests on customer voice

Anecdotal evidence suggests that service guarantees and personal requests by service workers encourage customers to voice following failure. However, empirical support for these tactics in facilitating complaints to the organisation is limited. To address this deficiency, a 3 (guarantee treatment: none, unconditional or combined) x 2 (personal request to voice: yes or no) x 2 (failure severity: minor or major) full factorial, between subjects experiment was conducted in a restaurant context. Findings suggest that offering a service guarantee, regardless of whether it is unconditional or combined, can encourage voice. Severity of the failure was also found to be associated with voice. Surprisingly, however, a personal request to voice was not related to customers&rsquo; voice intentions. Implications of the findings are discussed.<br /

Service recovery in a service guarantee context

This study employed a 2 x 2 full-factorial, between-subjects design experiment examining the influence of service failure severity and fix on hotel guests&rsquo; satisfaction following invocation of a service guarantee. The study involved a sample of 130 online panel members. As expected, guests are less dissatisfied following a minor (versus a major) service failure while satisfaction is enhanced when the problem is corrected. Surprisingly, fix has a stronger influence on satisfaction when a severe failure occurs, and satisfaction evaluations are approximately equal regardless of the severity of the failure when the problem is fixed.<br /

A novel romance : conceptualising emotional attachment as a barrier to adoption

The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) aims to understand consumers&rsquo; adoption of new technologies. Some 30 years after TAM was first proposed, it is still widely used today. This paper proposes an extended version of the TAM, with the primary addition to it being the construct of consumers&rsquo; emotional attachment to an existing product. The expanded TAM, Technology Acceptance Model with Emotional Attachment (TAME), is applied to the understudied area of e-book reader technology and its adoption by consumers who read for pleasure versus for academic purposes, as has been the focus of past research on e-book readers. The extended model considers consumers&rsquo; emotional attachment to paper books (pbooks) as a likely barrier to the take up of e-book reader technology.<br /

The effect of attitudes and experience on respondent answers to demographic questions in on-line surveys

Survey response rates and response quality are declining in most markets, threatening the viability of many established research techniques. One attempt to combat this has been to make survey completion more convenient for respondents, with on-line surveys being an example of this. This paper looks at respondent attitudes to demographic questions in on-line surveys &ndash; questions that are crucial for many analysis practices and yet often have the highest non-completion rates. The exploratory survey conducted here (n=198) examined attitudes towards surveys and empirically examined the reasons behind non-completion and intentions to give misleading information. The results suggest that general attitudes towards providing demographic data in on-line surveys are related to the likely response behaviour, and the more uncomfortable someone claims to be with providing this data, the more likely they will be to either omit a response or exit the survey altogether. Past experience with on-line surveys increases the chances of respondents answering completely and accurately and in most cases, significantly reduces the likelihood of exiting the survey completely if asked these questions. Finally, there is some evidence that providing broad categorical response options is preferred to more specific categories or open text boxes, and this may represent the best technique for improving response rates and quality.<br /

The influence of procedural and interactional justice, and disconfirmation on customers post recovery satisfaction evaluations

This study examines the influence of distributive and interactional justice and disconfirmation on customers&rsquo; postrecovery satisfaction evaluations, and in so doing, combines, for the first time, two existing instruments to operationalise the interactional justice construct. Using Structural Equation Modelling, the findings suggest that while both disconfirmation and justice are important predictors of satisfaction, distributive justice has the greatest influence. The research presented here reports on a section of a larger experiment-based study examining how customers&rsquo; postrecovery satisfaction evaluations are influenced by the way in which the organisation responds to the failure.<br /

Justice-based service recovery in a service guarantee context

Although many service organisations have committed resources to developing service guarantee programmes, empirical research assessing their influence of consumers\u27 post purchase evaluations is limited. This thesis addresses this deficiency in the guarantee literature by adapting and extending an established model of perceived justice and consumer satisfactionto the service guarantee context

The influence of guarantee compensation and fix on service recovery

This study employed a 3 x 2 full-factorial, between-subjects design experiment examining the influence of service guarantee compensation and fix on hotel guests&rsquo; satisfaction following invocation of a service guarantee. The study involved a sample of 390 online panel members. As expected, satisfaction is enhanced when the problem is corrected, however overcompensating guests beyond what was initially promised does not enhance satisfaction evaluations. Increasing compensation from the low to the medium (promised) level results in stronger satisfaction ratings when the problem is fixed versus when it is not.<br /

The influence of failure severity and perceived employee effort on consumers\u27 postcomplaint negative WOM intentions in a service guarantee context

This study employed a 2 x 2 full-factorial, between-subjects design experiment examining the influence of failure severity and perceived employee effort on hotel guests&rsquo; negative word-ofmouth (WOM) intentions following invocation of a service guarantee. The study involved a sample of 131 online panel members. Results suggest that negative WOM intentions reduced when a greater level of effort is exerted by staff in rectifying the guest&rsquo;s problem and increased when a more severe failure is experienced. There is a stronger difference in guests&rsquo; negative WOM intentions between the high and low employee effort conditions when a minor versus a severe service failure is experienced by guests.<br /