The impact of outcome, competency and affect on service referral

Abstract

Proposes a model to explain consumers’ willingness to recommend a service provider. The model considers four predictors of this phenomenon: affect, outcome, competency and courtesy. In a laboratory setting, subjects read and responded to a scenario describing a service encounter of a fictitious individual with a dry cleaner and/or an attorney. The subjects were later asked how likely they were to recommend this service provider to a friend experiencing a similar problem. Separate path analyses were performed to analyze each type of service encounter; and in both scenarios, outcome, competency, courtesy, joy and disgust were found to influence the likelihood that the consumer would recommend a particular service provider. The proposed model accounts for more than 72 percent of the variation in the subjects’ decision to recommend.

Citation

Johnson, M., Zinkhan, G.M. and Ayala, G.S. (1998), "The impact of outcome, competency and affect on service referral", Journal of Services Marketing, Vol. 12 No. 5, pp. 397-415. https://doi.org/10.1108/08876049810235432