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The objective of this paper is to describe the teleological actions needed to assess and manage critical incidents that cause negative emotions in service encounters. Teleological actions are movements into the future that are believed to be move either towards a predictable/known or unpredictable/unknown state or condition. The authors distinguish between, define and apply three categories: transformative – ad hoc and present-based actions; formative – pre-determined and past-based actions; and rationalist – goal-directed and future-based actions.

A qualitative study, based upon a two-phase approach applying convenience and judgemental sampling, was used. Focussing on one teleological theory, a process of abductive matching was applied throughout the study. Abductive matching refers to recurring themes, patterns and categories that are uncovered through the iterative processes of analysis. The teleological framework structured and guided the data collection and empirical observations.

Seen through the perspective of teleological actions, the study enhances our understanding of the manner in which critical incidents generate negative emotions in service encounters. Through the same perspective, the investigation also reveals that the outcome of a negative service encounter depends upon the interactive interface between service provider and service receiver.

The teleological actions between service providers and service receivers in negative service encounters appear to be mediators between cause-and-effect on the one hand (critical incident and negative emotions) and a perceptual gap on the other (outcome of negative service encounter). The teleological perspective also provides numerous opportunities for further research in this area.

Managers should strive to understand the teleological actions potentially undertaken by service receivers, so that they can deal with the teleological actions of their front-line staff accordingly. The interactive interface between a service provider and a service receiver is crucial in assessing and managing critical incidents.

Based on teleological actions, the investigation provides both a valuable and complementary contribution on assessing and managing critical incidents and the negative emotions that are often triggered in the service-encounter interface between a service provider and a service receiver. Providers also need to educate their staff on what can occur and on how to react appropriately.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the reasons why customers often cannot or do not exit a negative service encounter (lock-in) and to discuss how this affects their well-being and coping responses. This contributes to the research on how negative service encounters emerge and evolve and how such encounters impact customer well-being and subsequent responses.

An inductive, exploratory approach was used. Interviews with 20 service customers yielded over 90 detailed lock-in experiences across 25 different services. A multi-step, iterative coding process was used with a mixture of coding techniques that stem from a grounded theory approach.

Four categories of factors that caused customers to endure a negative event were identified (physical lock-in, dependency on the service, social lock-in and psychological lock-in). Customers either experienced inner turmoil (if they perceived having the option to stay or leave) or felt captive; both impacted their well-being and coping strategies in different ways. Three characteristics of negative events that caused lock-in to persist over time were identified.

This is a qualitative study that aims to identify factors behind customer lock-in, reduced well-being and coping strategies across different types of service encounters. Future research may build on these themes to investigate lock-in during specific service encounters in greater depth.

This research provides insights regarding how service providers can anticipate lock-in situations. In addition, the findings point to several ways in which frontline employees can assist customers with the coping process, during lock-in.

Customer lock-in during a service encounter is a common, yet unexplored phenomenon. This research contributes to a better understanding of why customers endure negative events and how such perceptions are reflected in their experiences and behaviors.

The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize and describe how service providers’ and service receivers’ teleological actions relate to negative emotions after critical incidents in service encounters have occurred.

Three categories of teleological actions are used: transformative – ad hoc and present-based actions, formative – pre-determined and past-based actions and rationalist – goal-directed and future-based actions.

The empirical findings indicate that airline ground staff should interact differently with air passengers based on the negative emotions involved and the teleological actions undertaken after critical incidents in service encounters have occurred.

The current research improves the interactive and sequential understanding of how to manage negative emotions through teleological actions in service encounters between a service provider and a service receiver after critical incidents have occurred, as well as providing numerous opportunities for further research in services.

It is an important and relevant insight that it is necessary to understand both the initial and derived causes of negative emotions and the subsequent effects and outcomes occurring in service encounters after critical incidents have arisen.

This current study provides theoretical and managerial contributions to manage negative emotions after critical incidents have occurred in service encounters.

The purpose of this paper is to describe and test a construct of perceived justice and its DIP‐dimensions (i.e. distributive, interactional, and procedural) in the context of both the consumers' initial negative service experiences' and the following processes of complaint handling. The objective is also to investigate similarities and differences of perceived justice in negative service experiences and complaint handling, and the validity of the constructs over time.

A triangular approach is used, based upon interviews and a survey in the Norwegian tourism industry. This paper reports on the results from a survey consisting of 3,104 customers. Comparative and confirmatory testing of perceived justice during the initial service encounter and subsequent complaint‐handling process has been performed.

The DIP‐dimensions of the construct of perceived justice in the service encounters tested have indicated a satisfactory fit, validity, and reliability.

The empirical findings provide a seed for future research to refine and extend corporate endeavors in managing critical incidents of both service encounters and service recovery.

Strategies to manage the perceived justice in negative service encounters and complaint handling should aim at managing the DIP‐dimensions of negative incidents in service encounters.

The DIP‐construct brings together, complements and fortifies existing theory and previous research in the context of justice in service encounters and complaint handling. Addressing both pre‐ and post‐complaint processes provides a complementary contribution to the field in focus.

The purpose of this paper is to describe and test a construct of perceived justice from an airline and hospital industry perspective. Furthermore, the similarities and differences of perceived justice in negative service encounters within the airline and hospital setting, and the validity of the constructs in the two different contexts is investigated.

This paper reports on the results obtained from a South African survey on respondents who experienced a negative service incident in the last year in the airline and hospital industries. The two service settings being used purposely to reveal possible differences in the constructs in settings where life and health are at risk compared to a more hedonistic service. Comparative and confirmatory testing of perceived justice during service encounters in a hospital and airline setting was performed.

Three dimensions of the perceived justice construct tested in the airline and hospital service encounters presented a satisfactory fit and were found to be valid and reliable. The three dimensions are distributive, interactional and procedural justice.

The main research limitations of this paper include that the construct has only been tested on a sample consisting of specific customer‐firm service encounters in airlines and hospitals in South Africa, which may indicate less applicability in other contexts. Yet, the empirical findings provide a basis for future research to refine and extend corporate endeavors in managing negative incidents in both the health care and tourism industries.

The findings indicate that the notion of perceived justice is the same regardless of service industry. However, the average perception of justice is lower within hospital than in the airline industry. The similarities within these two industries imply that cross‐industry strategies can be developed to understand and manage the perceived justice in negative service encounters based on three justice dimensions.

The paper adds value by complementing and fortifying current theory and research on the justice construct from a service encounter and complaint handling perspective. By comparing the justice hospital and airline industries, this paper contributes to and complements the overall field of study by identifying similarities and the applicability of the justice concept across service industries.

Customer satisfaction formation represents a dynamic phenomenon, especially in extended service encounters. A single service encounter may have an extended duration and feature several service interactions, which the customer can evaluate independently. This paper aims to offer a dynamic perspective on satisfaction formation, which indicates that what matters is not only the interactions a customer confronts but also when these interactions occur.

Research from social psychology provides a foundation for hypothesizing different effects of positive and negative critical incidents. Negative critical incidents likely are more important for overall satisfaction if they occur at the end of a service encounter. Positive critical incidents should have stronger effects at the beginning. In a 2×2 experimental design, participants considered a five‐day holiday hotel experience.

The data support the predicted dominance of a recency effect for negative critical incidents, such that a negative critical incident has a greater negative impact on customers' overall satisfaction when it occurs at the end of a service encounter instead of at the beginning. For positive critical incidents, no significant differences arose between primacy and recency effects.

The results highlight the importance of process designs of service experiences. Managers should pay particular attention to avoiding service failures at the end of a service encounter.

Unlike research that only assesses satisfaction formation for service encounters from a non‐dynamic perspective, this study posits the importance of the order of interactions within a service encounter.

The purpose of this paper is to examine service receivers' negative emotions in two different service settings, namely at an airport and in a hospital.

A descriptive, convenience sampling survey method was used to collect data in South Africa consisting of a sample of 294 respondents at an airport and 288 respondents in a hospital. Data analysis included an exploratory factor analysis, and the results reported in this paper are based on the critical incident technique.

The findings indicate both similarities and differences in service receivers' negative emotions between the two service settings. Furthermore, the results were found to be valid and reliable.

The results obtained pertaining to the negative emotions that service receivers experience in two service settings in South Africa may provide the foundation for further research and replication in other countries. Furthermore, the results can aid in refining and extending service providers' efforts of managing critical incidents in different service settings in airline and hospital service settings.

Three main aspects of negative incidences in service encounters should be considered in strategies to manage critical incidents, namely those that are caused by: the service receiver; the service provider; or the service encounter context.

This study complements and reinforces existing theory pertaining to the negative emotions service receivers' experience in negative service encounters.

Reports on a study looking at dimensions of service provider performance that influence immediate emotional responses to service encounters, based on 914 service encounters. Identifies five service‐provider dimensions that are significant predictors of emotional response to services. Finds that different service‐provider dimensions influence positive as compared with negative emotional responses and that temporal duration and spatial intimacy of the encounter affect both the reported levels and relative importance of these service‐provider dimensions to emotional responses.

This services marketing research provides a theoretical framework for experiential and relationship marketing and extends the theory of transcendent customer experience (TCE). Specifically, this paper aims to identify how the drivers (emotional intelligence [EI]), outcomes (customer loyalty, willingness to pay and word of mouth [WOM] intentions) and influences (openness to experience) of TCE are integrated. The research contributes to the theoretical debate regarding ability-based and self-reported EI measures by examining their influence on TCE.

Students and general consumers provided data through structured online surveys in three survey-based experiments. Linear and multiple regressions, mediation analyses and simple effects tests were used for data analysis.

Findings suggest that self-reported and ability-based measures of EI influence TCE differently. Participants who had high self-reported EI evaluated positive service encounters as more transcendent than they evaluated negative service encounters. Participants who had high ability-based EI evaluated positive service encounters as less transcendent than they evaluated negative service encounters. TCE experiences evoked higher loyalty, willingness to pay (WTP) and WOM recommendations. Furthermore, dispositional factors were significant in forming TCE: participants who were highly open to experience and had high ability-based EI interpreted their service encounter as less transcendent than did participants who were more closed to experience and had low ability-based EI.

TCE, a relatively new concept, offers theoretical advancement in context and constructs. The student-provided data gave high internal validity; the general consumer-provided data gave external validity. Ideally, a future field study in an actual consumption setting should replicate the findings. A self-reported questionnaire used to measure constructs may have introduced common method variance that biased the results.

By understanding that EI affects perceptions of transcendence in positive/negative service encounters, marketers can better implement consumer-oriented marketing strategies that will enhance TCE, customer loyalty, WTP and WOM.

Despite considerable research in experiential and relationship marketing, room remains for theoretical and practical enhancement in the under-researched concept of TCE. This research is the first attempt to extend TCE theory to marketing by identifying the drivers, outcomes and moderators of TCE in service encounters. The research also provides theoretical advancement in EI research. The results contradict previous research claiming that ability-based and self-reported measures are equally valid. Instead, using the two EI scales interchangeably leads to potentially different outcomes.

It has now become a normal part of the consumption journey for consumers to share their positive and negative service encounters with firms on microblogs such as Twitter. There is, however, a limited amount of research on service encounter microblog word of mouth (SEMWOM) and its impact on firm reputation from a receiver’s perspective. This study aims to understand the comparative effects of positive and negative valence SEMWOM on receivers’ perceptions of firms’ reputations and the factors that are particularly salient to receivers’ perceptions of firm reputation upon exposure to SEMWOM.

An experiment exposed 372 Twitter users to positive and negative valence SEMWOM. To determine whether changes in perception of firm reputation occurred on exposure to both positive and negative valence SEMWOM, participants’ perceptions of a range of US airlines were measured before and after exposure to the SEMWOM. To confirm the factors that influence the perception of reputation on such exposure, six structural equation models were created to determine the comparative effects of positive and negative valence SEMWOM among three electronic WOM media as follows: video, photo and text.

Both positive and negative valence SEMWOM affect receivers’ perceptions of airlines’ reputations on exposure. Furthermore, the factors that influence perceptions of reputation on exposure to SEMWOM vary depending on valence and type of media contained in a tweet.

Although consumers now routinely share their positive and negative service encounters with brands on microblogs, scant research has examined receivers of positive and negative valence SEMWOM, important actors in the microblog domain. This study addresses this research gap by empirically investigating the impact of both positive and negative valence SEMWOM on receivers’ perceptions of firm reputation upon exposure to it.