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Negative customer-to-customer interactions (NCCI) occurring in physical service encounters can have a detrimental effect on a focal customer’s experience. This paper aims to explore how the interplay between the physical servicescape and the presence and behavior of other customers can lead to NCCI. Moreover, through an examination of customers’ responsibility attribution, the paper underlines the need for service organizations to manage this interplay.

The authors rely on a mixed approach with two studies grounded in the Stimulus–Organism–Response paradigm. In a preliminary quantitative study, the authors test a model of the effects of NCCI on customers’ attribution and behavioral outcomes using partial least squares structural equation modeling. Next, in a qualitative study, they collect and explore NCCI incidents in eight service industries relying on the critical incident technique (CIT).

When experiencing NCCI, customers attribute at least partial responsibility for their negative experience to the service provider. The findings of the CIT study reveal three interplay mechanisms leading to NCCI: when other customers’ behavior is triggered by the physical servicescape; when other customers’ behavior is incongruent with the behavioral norms set by the physical servicescape; and when the physical servicescape is altered by other customers’ misbehavior.

This paper provides a comprehensive, empirically grounded, understanding of the interplay between the physical and social servicescape, focusing on the presence and behavior of the other customers and its effect on the customer experience.

By drawing on theories of social identity, attraction, social comparison and consumer identification, this research seeks to examine how consumers' perceptions of other customers of an organisation (the other customer effect) may have an influence on corporate image and consumer‐company identification. This study aims to test a model integrating these constructs in two contexts, i.e. products and services. It also seeks to investigate the attitudinal and behavioural consequences of a favourable corporate image in order to provide more insights to the argument that a corporate marketing approach helps to enhance marketing performance.

A survey of a convenience sample of 383 adult consumers is conducted. Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) is employed in order to test the proposed model. An alternative model is examined both in products and in services contexts.

The results indicate that perceptions about other customers influence customers' affective and behavioural reactions towards a company for both products and services. This finding suggests that corporate‐level marketing activities aiming to increase interaction among consumers lead to favourable corporate image and higher consumer‐company identification and hence desirable marketing outcomes. Furthermore, results show that for services the other customer effect is more prominent than for product offerings.

This study extends the concept of other customer effect to the context of corporate image and consumer‐company identification studies. It provides evidence that shifting towards corporate‐level marketing gives organisations another avenue for gaining a distinct position in the minds of consumers. Furthermore, by addressing both service and product contexts, it shows that other customer effect may exist beyond services studies.

The purpose of this paper is to identify how the mere presence of other customers in a service encounter influences customers' evaluations of restaurant services.

Phenomenological interviews were used to reveal the dimensions of other customers and to develop hypotheses on the moderating variables that influence the effect of other customers. A scenario‐based experiment was used to test the hypotheses.

The analysis reveals that “other customers” is a multidimensional construct consisting of number, age, gender, appearance, attire, and public behavior. Also, the importance of each dimension varies according to situational variables such as evaluation stages (pre‐ versus post‐encounter stages), the context of a visit (task‐ versus recreational‐orientations), and the quality‐related risks (high versus low).

The study provides a rationale for service providers to strategically manage their customers. It also gives guidelines of how customers should be “managed”.

The present study is meaningful in the sense that it is one of the first empirical studies which concentrated on the passive role (mere presence) of other customers in a service encounter. The dimensions of other customers and the moderating variables revealed are expected to stimulate further research in the area.

A self‐help guide to achieving success in business. Directed more towards the self‐employed, it is relevant to other managers in organizations. Divided into clear sections on creativity and dealing with change; importance of clear goal setting; developing winning business and marketing strategies; negotiating skills; leadership; financial skills; and time management.

Dyadic interactions between customers and service providers rarely occur in isolation. Still, there is a lack of systematic knowledge about the roles that different types of nontechnological third parties – that is, other customers, pets, other employees and other firms – can adopt in relation to customers and service providers during encounters. The present study aims to unravel these roles and highlight their implications for customers, service providers and/or third parties.

This research relies on a systematic review of literature in the Web of Science using a search string pertaining to the research study’s objectives. In total, 2,726 articles were screened by title and abstract using clear inclusion and exclusion criteria, thereby extracting 189 articles for full-text eligibility. The final sample consisted of 139 articles for coding and analysis.

The analyses reveal that other customers, pets, other employees and other firms can adopt five roles: bystander, connector, endorser, balancer and partner. Each role has different implications for customers, service providers and/or third parties. Additionally, the five roles are associated with distinct constellations of the customer, the service provider and the third party. These roles and constellations are dynamic and not mutually exclusive.

This research contributes to the service encounter literature by providing a thorough understanding of the various third-party roles and their implications for customers, service providers and/or third parties during encounters. As such, this research sheds light on the conditions under which third parties become “significant others” in service encounters and identifies avenues for future research.

Consumers who share their suggestions with firms contribute valuable knowledge and both exhibit and reinforce positive customer engagement. Yet, the motivational antecedents of direct-to-firm customer suggestion sharing remain understudied. This study aims to investigate how potential self, other customer and firm benefits motivate consumer suggestion sharing.

A critical incident pretest explores the domain and establishes ecological validity. Two scenario-based experimental studies test the proposed relationships in distinct service contexts.

Results support a prosocial (helpful) view of suggestion sharing – potential benefits to other customers motivate suggestion sharing. Potential benefits for the firm play two roles, namely, they indirectly motivate suggestion sharing by increasing consumers’ perceived outcome expectancy, illustrating a pragmatic mechanism, and they directly motivate suggestion sharing when service quality is high, illustrating a conditional, reciprocity-driven mechanism. When service quality is low, consumers are less likely to share firm-benefitting suggestions and more likely to share non-beneficial suggestions, highlighting a potential low service quality “trap” in which firms can become stuck.

Future research is needed to study the antecedents of attitude toward suggestion sharing and the effect of relationship strength on suggestion sharing.

Managerially, multiple paths are identified by which firms can motivate suggestion sharing. The low-service quality “trap” indicates that low-service quality firms should not rely on, and should perhaps even ignore, customer suggestions as a tool for improving their offerings.

By experimentally investigating the motivational antecedents of direct-to-firm consumer suggestion sharing, this paper fills a gap in extant research and provides a foundation upon which future suggestion sharing research can build.

The purpose of this study is to examine the role of other customers in explaining customers’ relation with a brand. A conceptual model, which incorporates other customers along with atmospherics, food quality and service quality, is proposed to better understand how customers form their brand preference for fine dining restaurants.

A quantitative research methodology, using structural equation modeling, was adopted to understand the role of other customers along with other restaurant attributes. Data were collected from the customers of fine dining restaurants resulting in 324 usable surveys.

The findings supported the sequential link for: restaurant experience attributes – brand relationship and brand preference. While all restaurant attributes except other customers explain the satisfaction of customers, only service quality and other customers played a significant role in forming the brand image in the minds of restaurant guests. Overall, this study acknowledged the importance of both other customers and employees in fine dining restaurants’ branding.

The results suggest that customers in servicescape have a significant role in creating a successful brand image for restaurants. Moreover, service quality is also key to achieve a unique image, thereby suggesting that employees could be a source of differentiation and competitive advantage by managing their brand related behaviors.

This research was one of the first to study the role of other customers in restaurant service experience along with other attributes to assess customers’ brand relation and brand preference for fine dining restaurants.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how and why other‐customer misbehavior has a negative influence on customer satisfaction with the service firm.

Data for this study were gathered by retrospective experience sampling.

There are several important findings that can be obtained from the results. First, people consider another customer's failure to be the firm's responsibility when they perceive that the failure is under the firm's volitional control (i.e. controllability attribution). This controllability attribution leads to customer expectations of compensation for recovery from dissatisfaction. Second, stability attributions about other‐customer failures were not found to be significantly related to the firm's responsibility. Third, the severity of the other‐customer failure experience bears no relation to the customer's service recovery expectation, but it is negatively related to satisfaction. Finally, the customer's evaluation of service is not only affected by the other‐customer misbehavior, but also by how employees react to situations when other customers are unruly or potentially disruptive.

Providing employees with the appropriate coping and problem‐solving skills for working with problem customers is a key issue for service providers. More importantly, employees should be trained to help the affected customers, to alleviate any bad feelings caused by the other‐customer's misbehavior.

The paper suggests that employees in a service‐providing firm may need to act as “police officers” to ensure that all their customers behave appropriately.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how the organizational recovery response to other‐customer failure influences the affected customer's level of satisfaction, unfavorable word‐of‐mouth (WOM), and repurchase intentions toward the firm.

Two experimental studies: 2 (complaint versus no complaint)×3 (employee effort (EE): high versus low versus no)×2 (compensation versus no compensation) were used to test the research hypotheses in a restaurant context.

In cases of other‐customer failure, the outcome valence (failure discontinues versus continues) influences how complainants and non‐complainants rate their perceptions of satisfaction and subsequent behavioral intentions toward the firm. Customers who perceive that there has been good EE made to help solve the problem of other‐customer failure give higher service evaluations than those who perceive little or no EE. Additionally, there are insignificant differences in the rating of satisfaction, repurchase intention, or negative WOM from customers in the latter group. Offering compensation is not a cure‐all. It has the strongest effect on non‐complainants in the low EE scenario.

Service managers need to design well‐balanced organizational recovery systems in terms of the outcome of recovery (i.e. compensation) and the way in which the recovery process is delivered (i.e. EE) to the affected customers in response to other‐customer failures. Since the influence of compensation on service evaluations is largely dependent on customer perceptions of employee‐effort, providing employees with the appropriate problem‐solving skills for working with both problem‐causing customers and the problem‐affected customers is a key issue for service marketers in cases of other‐customer failure.

The paper examines the importance of the as yet under‐researched issue of how organizational recovery responses to other‐customer failure influence a customer's service evaluations of the firm.

This paper aims to explore the different forms of other customers' influence in various service settings.

The critical incident technique (CIT) method was used to collect and analyze the data. A total of 142 critical incidents involving other customers' influence in services were collected.

Based on CIT analysis, nine types of other customers' influence involving positive and negative, direct and indirect customer‐to‐customer interactions emerge. In addition, the researchers find that the degree of other customers' influence varies for different service settings.

Methodologically, there are a number of limitations of the CIT method used in this research. The paper suggests ways to overcome these limitations. Moreover, findings of this research suggest a number of additional directions for future research.

This research suggests the importance of proactively managing customer‐to‐customer interactions during a service encounter experience.

This paper builds on previous research and provides empirically based analysis of the different forms of other customers' influence across service settings.