Service Employee Responses to Angry Customer Complaints

Service employees’ emotional and behavioral responses to angry customer complaints were examined to help firms improve their service recovery performance. Role-played complaints were conducted in a field experiment set in fast-food restaurants. Actors played customers who complained in an angry fashion to service employees. Employees’ immediate emotional (i.e., expressed anger) and delayed behavioral responses (i.e., restitution offered) were observed. A follow-up scenario-based experimental study was used to retest the hypotheses and add controls to rule out potential rival explanations. In both studies, level of customer status (low vs. high; true experimental design) and strength of a restaurant’s service climate (weak vs. strong; quasi-experimental design) were manipulated. The findings confirm that employees in a weak service climate expressed more anger and were less likely to offer restitution to low- compared to high-status customers. In contrast, in a strong service climate, employee responses were less dependent on customer status and converged at a low level of anger and high probability of restitution offered. Furthermore, the consistent immediate affective and delayed behavioral responses suggest that a strong service climate is internalized by frontline employees. This study contributes to service theory by establishing a customer status main effect on both affective and conative employee responses and by confirming service climate as a boundary condition for the customer status main effect. A key implication for managers is that establishing a strong service climate is important for achieving effective service recovery in increasingly diverse societies.