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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.

The purpose of this paper is to study the service responses of service providers to the affective states of business clients and to test whether they have a positive effect on the client's job performance, as well as their satisfaction and bonding to the service provider.

The results are based on a survey of 240 business travellers in Taiwan. Ordinary least square regression is applied to test the relationships.

Statistical tests confirm that service responses to emotional states have a positive effect on customer satisfaction, job performance and bonding. While service responses aimed at easing customers’ emotional problems increase satisfaction and job performance, true bonding is only facilitated through service responses that are centred on affection and social‐emotional support.

The authors investigate the personal service encounter with business customers who are using the service to perform a task. The findings are applicable to services that deal with customers in a similar way.

The paper shows that appropriate service responses to emotional states of customers, including business customers, can lead to higher satisfaction and bonding to the service provider. Service responses enable business customers to perform better.

The authors apply the concept of pre‐consumption emotions of customers to business clients. While pre‐consumption emotional states of customers have been studied much less that the elicitation of customer emotions, in the business‐to‐business sector emotions are seldom addressed. However, the study demonstrates that emotions are an important input factor that clients bring into the service encounter, which service providers can deal with to their competitive advantage.

Displaying a sense of humour provides various interpersonal benefits including reducing tension and promoting conflict resolution, but should a firm use humour in response to publicly viewable online customer complaints after a service failure? The purpose of this study is to demonstrate that a firm’s use of humour in response to negative online consumer reviews has both positive and negative effects on perceptions of corporate image from a customer-as-onlooker perspective.

Three experimental studies are conducted and analysis of variance is used to empirically test the hypotheses.

Although humorous responses have an unfavourable influence on perceived trustworthiness of the firm, they have a favourable influence on perceived excitingness of the firm. The former influence is tied to lower perceived firm sincerity, whereas the latter is tied to higher perceived firm innovativeness and coolness. Furthermore, humour within the customer complaint itself is shown to moderate the influence of humorous responses on perceptions of the firm. Finally, regardless of the type of humour used (i.e. affiliative or aggressive humour) in the humorous response, the positive effect of humorous response remains strong, although aggressive humour further aggravates the negative impact of humorous response on trustworthiness.

The experimental set-up may limit external validity of the study, and the research is limited to the variables examined.

Humorous response is identified as a non-traditional approach to online customer complaints that poses a double-edged sword for managers of service organizations. Firms should avoid using humour in online service recovery if perceptions of trustworthiness are critical or if complaints are written in a neutral tone. However, such responses may be successfully used when a firm wants to position itself as exciting and if complaints are also humorous. Finally, firms are advised to avoid aggressive humour.

The present research represents one of the few studies in marketing to examine the potential of injecting humour into complaint management and service recovery. In addition, this study considers the consumer-as-onlooker perspective inherent in social media.

This study aims to explore the various approaches used in the general customer service industry to develop a conceptual framework for evaluating the responses of facility managers to user post-occupancy feedback.

This study uses conceptual analysis based on a comprehensive review of relevant literature.

The results of the study established 24 propositions which are categorised under organisational response dimensions specific to facilities management (FM): timeliness, facilitation, redress, apology, credibility of explanation, attentiveness, effort and their relationships with overall satisfaction and post-feedback behaviour, such as word of mouth and acceptance to continue using the facilities.

The established propositions are derived from existing theories using a deductive approach. The framework can be further enhanced to suit various applications in FM services.

This conceptual framework is a generic model, appropriate to many FM scenarios. The framework can be used to develop standard policies and procedures to foster and encourage collaborative relationships between users and facility managers. It reinforces transparency and trust between facility managers and users during the operation and management of the facilities, and improves FM effectiveness, facility performance and user post-occupancy experience.

In the FM area, no systematic approach has been previously established to evaluate and improve the response process to the users’ feedback. The proposed framework is a pioneer contribution in this area.

This study aims to investigate bystanders' perceptions and reactions to management responses to consumer complaints through digital service channels. Specific purposes are to examine how management response (i.e. warmth, competence) and individual differences (i.e. bystander power) work together to influence bystanders' information processing of service recovery.

This research consists of two main studies which employed web-based experiments. Both studies used a 2 (management response: warmth vs competence) × 2 (individual power: low vs high) between-subjects design. A total of 240 participants were recruited from Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform in Study 1, and 233 participants were recruited from a market research company in Study 2.

Study 1 suggested that for the high-power group, warmth-related responses increased service perceptions (perceived diagnosticity and perceived fairness), and for low-power group, competence-related responses enhanced service perceptions. Study 2 confirmed the results of Study 1 and further demonstrated bystanders' service perceptions as the underlying mechanisms to connect the interactive effect of management response and individual power on satisfaction with complaint handling and WOM intentions.

The current research demonstrates how companies can effectively manage customers' experiences (i.e. bystanders' experiences) with service recovery management on digital platforms by demonstrating effective management responses to consumer complaints through digital service channels.

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that explores bystanders' individual characteristics related to the information processing of service recovery through digital service channels.

The purpose of this paper is to explore influencing factors that affect the effectiveness of service recovery strategies using social network from operations management perspective. Specifically, the authors study the relationships between social media agent responses to customer complaints, customer emotion changes and customer satisfaction. Furthermore, the authors investigate the roles of recovery speed and failure severity in the service recovery process using social network platform.

The results are based on 347 mini cases drawn from the Twitter accounts of a sample of airlines. Grounded theory approach is used to conduct qualitative analysis using NVivo 9, a qualitative data analysis program. A conceptual framework was developed, then tested using χ² analysis.

Agent responses that do not require customers to take further initiatives for problem solving have positive effects on customer emotion alleviation and satisfaction. In contrast, responses that provide further directions poses negative effect on service recovery outcomes. There is a strong positive linkage between customer emotion change and customer satisfaction. Surprisingly, the direct effect of recovery speed on customer emotion and satisfaction is not supported by the data. Rather, it plays a moderating role in affecting the relationship between agent responses and customer satisfaction. The qualitative data further reveals the pivotal role of failure severity, one of key service failure attributes.

The authors study service businesses’ recovery strategies using social media. A conceptual framework is developed to link agent responses, customer emotion changes and customer satisfaction from the lens of service providers, using an operations-oriented approach. Finding on recovery speed and failure severity reveal that these variables play different roles when service recovery is operated on social media platform as compared to traditional channels. Additionally, relying on tweets as data sources has constrained us from assessing other long-term service recovery outcomes such as loyalty, repurchase intent and word of mouth. The drawback is resulted from the limited information conveyed through tweets, which tends to be short and brief. The study focusses on the airline industry, which limits the generalizability of the findings to other service industries.

The authors highlight the value and potential of service recovery strategies using social network and provide insights for recovery operations where agent responses should be focussing on real time problem solving. The findings support the benefits of empowering social network agents for service recovery operations. Improving recovery speed should be less of a priority as it serves as a qualifier when service recovery is operated via social network. Given the pivotal role of failure severity, it is critical for social network agents to stand in the shoes of the complaining customers, making imminent assessment of the actual failure severity and taking action accordingly in real time. In the meantime, effective communication through social network may help to lower perceived magnitude of failure by customers, which in turn enhance the effectiveness of other service recovery efforts.

This study is the first attempt to investigate the service recovery process using social media from an operations-oriented perspective. The results supports the potentials of employing service recovery strategies using social media.

Social networks offer consumers the ability to voice their opinions of brands in a real-time, public setting. This represents a unique challenge for firms as brand managers must develop new strategies for properly communicating with consumers, especially in the event of a service failure. The purpose of this research is to explore the impact of various adaptive service recovery strategies via social media, specifically Twitter.

Through a series of experimental manipulations, four service recovery strategies are tested alongside two variations of consumer complaint tweets. The service recovery responses vary in their degree of adaptiveness, which have differential impacts on numerous consumer outcome variables.

The findings indicate that highly adaptive recoveries responses positively impact consumers’ evaluations of service recovery satisfaction, leading to greater consumer behavioral intentions. Additionally, the type of tweet the consumer sends may further reveal their expectations for adequate service recovery responses.

This study is the first to empirically test the use of social media platforms in the service failure and recovery context. Although social media is commonly used for such purposes by practitioners, academic research up to this point has predominately focused on social media for generating word-of-mouth. Further, this study seeks to examine how service adaptability is perceived from the customer perspective, as opposed to the more traditional employee viewpoint.

Consumers often discuss brands and companies online, but no research details how service providers’ responses to online reviews influence other readers’ perceptions of the reviews and responses. Based on justice theory and the accountability principle, both integrated in equity theory, the purpose of this paper is to examine how service providers should react to different degrees of negative reviews to enhance readers’ attitudes, patronage intentions, and intentions to spread positive word of mouth.

A 3 (review set balance: positive, neutral, negative) × 6 (response strategy) full-factorial between-subjects experiment included 973 respondents.

More negative balance demands more effort from the service provider to create positive attitudes and encourage behavioural intentions. If a minority of reviewers are dissatisfied, no response is necessary; if the review set is neutral, the service provider should apologize and promise to resolve the problem; if a majority of reviewers are dissatisfied, the most effective response includes both an apology, promise and compensation. These effects are mediated by readers’ perceived trust in the response. Word of mouth also requires more effort than favourable attitudes or patronage intentions.

This research reflects the authors’ choices with regard to review set balance and managerial responses, which ensure internal validity but may limit external validity.

This study applies offline service recovery strategies to an online review context. It also explicitly incorporates the bystander (potential customer) perspective.