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Greater attention should be paid to the emotional aspects of the service experience. In this context, this paper aims to propose that emotions will have a different impact on customers’ complaint behavior and satisfaction depending on the hedonic or utilitarian nature of the service and for this purpose a valence-based approach is followed.

A sample of 809 service users was analyzed through multi-group structural equation modeling, including both hedonic (bars and cafeterias, n = 210) and utilitarian services (bank and public transportation services, n = 599).

Research findings show the different influence of emotions on customers’ complaint behavior and satisfaction depending on the service nature. Further, the negative affect does not influence behavioral outcomes in hedonic services, whereas positive affect exerts a slight lower influence in utilitarian services. Finally, the service nature plays a moderating role in the emotions–satisfaction and emotions–complaint behavior relationship.

This research shows the important role of the service nature, reporting different results for hedonic and utilitarian services in the influence of emotions in behavioral outcomes.

This research extends existing services offshoring literature by investigating how the type of information exchanged, technical support or personal billing, in conjunction with country-of-service-origin (COSO) influences consumer likelihood to react negatively (boycott issue importance, NWOM, perceived service quality) to an offshore service exchange.

Structural equations modelling is employed to assess relationships among constructs when country of service origin (New Zealand and the Philippines) and type of service provided (technical support and personal billing services) are varied. Using a scenario-based experimental design we collected 337 responses from a consumer panel across Australia.

Results indicate that both COSO and type of information exchanged affect service sentiment. Overall, consumers feel more negative and more likely to punish a company for offshoring to culturally dissimilar countries such as the Philippines than to culturally similar ones such as New Zealand. However, consumers were more concerned with personal billing services provided from offshore providers than technical support, regardless of COSO.

Practitioners need to understand customer sentiment about services offshoring in general as well as the relationship between service type and country of service origin when designing the global service supply chain.

This study extends theory by applying a multi-dimensional portfolio perspective in examining customer sentiment of offshore services. Understanding the underlying bases of customer concerns and how companies can mitigate negative perceptions allows firms to better manage service offshore strategy.

Minimal attention is given to the negative valences of customer engagement and how they manifest in ways that detract from service value. The purpose of this paper is to uncover the meaning and conceptual dimensions of disengagement and negative engagement in conjunction with positive engagement. It explores how three valences of engagement manifest towards dual objects: the service community and the focal service organisation. This exploration is based within a new and novel social service context.

A qualitative approach using (four) focus groups is used.

A conceptual model of customer engagement is derived from the groups that include strongly held and positive customer engagement; passive, yet negatively orientated customer disengagement; and active and destructive negative customer engagement. Positive customer engagement is found to be directed at the service community object, whereas customer disengagement and negative engagement are directed at the focal service organisation object. A spillover effect is also revealed whereby negative engagement with the focal service organisation detracts from customers’ positive engagement within their service community. This suggests that engagement within a social service is multifaceted: several engagement valences may exist within one service relationship. It also suggests that these engagement valences are interrelated.

This is the first paper to apply three valences of engagement within the one focal relationship and examine how they manifest towards two objects, providing a unique perspective of how different interactions within the service ecosystem can influence engagement.

Although service researchers have long suggested that customer mistreatment adversely impacts service employees' outcomes, statistical integration of current empirical findings has been lacking. This meta-analysis aims to review and statistically synthesize the state of research on the relationship between customer mistreatment and service employees' affective, attitudinal and behavioral outcomes.

The authors included 221 effect sizes of 135 independent samples from 119 primary studies (N = 47,964). The authors used a meta-analytic approach to quantitatively review the relationship between customer mistreatment and service employees' affective, attitudinal and behavioral outcomes. Meta-analysis structural equation modeling was used to explore the mediation mechanism of service employees' affective outcomes on the relationships between customer mistreatment and employees' attitudinal and behavioral outcomes. Meta-regression was applied to explore the impact of contextual-level moderators (i.e. service provider type and service delivery mode) on these relationships. Furthermore, we compared the effects of customer mistreatment with the effects of other organizational-related factors on some commonly measured employee outcomes.

The results show that customer mistreatment has a significant negative impact on service employees' affective outcomes (i.e. negative emotions), attitudinal outcomes (i.e. job satisfaction, organizational commitment, work engagement and turnover intention) and behavioral outcomes (i.e. job performance, surface acting and emotional labor). Additionally, service employees' negative emotions mediate the association between customer mistreatment and employees' job satisfaction, turnover intention, surface acting and emotional labor. Furthermore, the relationships between customer mistreatment and service employees' negative emotions and job performance are influenced by a contextual-level moderator (i.e. service delivery mode).

The authors contribute to the literature by providing robust meta-analytic estimates of the effects of customer mistreatment on a variety of service employees' affective, attitudinal and behavioral outcomes, as well as the different magnitudes of the effect sizes between customer mistreatment and other job-related and personality-related factors by quantifying the true variability of the effect sizes. The authors draw on current theories underpinning customer mistreatment to test a theoretical model of the mediation mechanism of service employees' affective outcomes (i.e. service employees' negative emotions) on the relationships between customer mistreatment and employees' attitudinal and behavioral outcomes. The authors explore the effects of two contextual-level factors (i.e. service provider types and service delivery mode) related to the service delivery context that may account for the variability of effect sizes across empirical studies.

The purpose of this study is to operationalise and measure the effects of negative customer engagement (CE) in conjunction with positive CE. Both valences are explored through affective, cognitive and behaviour dimensions, and, in relation to the antecedent of involvement and outcome of word-of-mouth (WOM). It also explores the moderating influence of service context by examining engagement within a social service versus a social networking site (SNS). Engagement with the dual focal objects of a service brand and a service community are also examined.

Structural equation modelling is used to analyse 625 survey responses.

Involvement is a strong driver of positive CE, and positive CE has a strong effect on WOM. These findings are consistent across the “brand” and “community” object, suggesting positive CE is mutually reinforced by different objects in a relationship. Positive CE is also found to operate consistently across the service types. Involvement is a moderately negative driver of negative CE, and negative CE is a positive driver of WOM. These relationships operate differently across the objects and service types. Involvement has a stronger inverse effect on negative CE for the social service, diverging from assumptions that negative CE is reflective of highly involved customers. Interestingly, negative CE has a stronger effect on WOM in the social service, highlighting the active and vocal nature of customers within this service context.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper to quantitatively measure positive and negative valences of engagement concurrently, and examine the moderating effect of dual objects across contrasting service types.

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 explore the effects of consumer role (involved vs observing) on consumer responses in the context of online group buying (OGB) service failures.

A scenario simulation method with a 2×3 factorial design was used to investigate the impact of consumer role (i.e. involved consumers and observing consumers) on consumer responses (i.e. perceived quality, negative electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM), and switching intention). The moderating role of seller offering type (i.e. physical products, true services, and pseudo services) on the relationship between the consumer role and responses was also tested.

The differences in perceived quality, negative eWOM, and switching intention between involved consumers and observing consumers were significant. Further, seller offering type moderated the relationship between consumer role and consumer response.

These findings provide several important theoretical and practical implications in regard to OGB service failure and recovery.

This study enriches OGB and service failure literature by a pioneering investigation of how consumer roles respond to OGB service failures and how different seller offering types influence the relationship between consumer role and consumer response. The results will help service providers of OGB benefit from enhancing their service recovery strategies to cope with OGB service failures.

Negative products/services are seen by customers as an unpleasant buying necessity to avoid or reduce some disutility. The negative concept as it relates to products/ services is based on the behavioral modification phenomena of negative reinforcement. Empirical data are presented in this article, which places fourteen product categories relative to the degree of negative perception associated with them. This procedure provides a model by which marketing executives can empirically determine whether their products/services are viewed as negative ones. This article is designed to: 1. Discuss the operant conditioning concepts of positive and negative reinforcement as they relate to purchasing and consumption behavior. 2. Suggest a pragmatic method for marketing practitioners to make distinctions between negative and positive products. 3. Aid marketers in examining the difference between the two to support the making of effective strategic and tactical decisions.

The purpose of this paper is to examine behavioral changes by consumers (i.e. changing time of day they contact a firm, requesting a domestic service provider, and ceasing doing business with the firm) when faced with being provided a service from abroad.

Data were collected from a pre‐recruited internet panel of 394 American consumers. Hierarchical regression analysis, including demographic and psychographic variables, was employed to determine which variables were instrumental in predicting behavioral changes among consumers when being provided a service from abroad.

The results suggest that American consumers are wary of services offshoring and that psychographic variables (boycott issue importance and negative word of mouth) are more instrumental than demographic variables in predicting behavioral changes by consumers.

Future research should examine consumer attitudes about services offshoring from populations in countries other than the US, and in relation to different types of services and the importance of those services to consumers.

Implications for firms include assessing their customer's perceptions of offshoring, proactively communicating with customers about offshoring practices, and providing customers with some control over their service interactions.

Previous researchers have highlighted the benefits of services offshoring to firms but also hypothesized that consumers may react negatively when provided services from abroad. In this research, it is found that consumers will change the way they interact with a firm when faced with being provided a service from abroad.

The purpose of this article is to explore the possible negative asymmetric effects in the impact of service quality on the satisfaction and retention of different customer segments in a professional business services context. Negative asymmetry means that a lower than average service quality evaluation has a stronger effect on customer satisfaction and retention than a higher than average evaluation.

The article provides a survey of 124 business customers of a Midwestern radio advertising services provider, preceded by nine in‐depth interviews with account reps of the advertising firm and two focus groups with business customers.

Along the service quality dimensions – customer satisfaction – retention chain, there are significant negative asymmetric effects and the mediating role of satisfaction varies widely. There are important differences across customer groups: service outcomes are most important determinants of customer satisfaction for large and relatively newer accounts; functional quality dimensions (empathy) are most important factors for small and relatively mature accounts.

Surveying customers of one organization in one industry reduces the generalizability of the findings. The study employed only two segmentation variables, while many other variables could be investigated. The focus is on the asymmetric effects of service quality; other factors, such as costs, were not considered.

Managers should invest resources in improving low performance in the service quality dimensions with strongest impact on customer satisfaction and highest negative asymmetry. The identified segment differences suggest the need to achieve strong results for large accounts and relatively new accounts. The customer relationship is most important for small accounts and relatively mature accounts. Maintaining service reliability is critical for small and new account retention.

This study is a first effort to explore the differences in effects across service quality dimensions and customer segments in a professional business service context. The findings indicate that aggregating customers and the service quality measurement can offer misleading information to managers.