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Don’t try harder: using customer inoculation to build resistance against service failures

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journal contribution
posted on 2018-06-18, 08:58 authored by Sven Mikolon, Benjamin Quaiser, Jan Wieseke
© 2014, Academy of Marketing Science. Capitalizing on a large-scale field experimental dataset involving 1,254 airline customers, this study introduces customer inoculation as a new, proactive strategy for mitigating the negative consequences that service failures have on customer satisfaction. Results confirm that customer inoculation eases the decrease in satisfaction when customers experience a service failure. Additional analyses indicate that customer inoculation does not harm customer satisfaction if no service failure occurs. This finding sets inoculation apart from expectation management and underscores the potential inoculation has for marketing practice. Furthermore, contrary to traditional recovery strategies for addressing service failures, customer inoculation operates in advance of a service failure and thereby circumvents potential drawbacks of traditional strategies. In sum, customer inoculation represents a novel strategy for addressing service failures with respect to existing marketing literature and expands the scope of action for companies when they cannot avoid offering occasionally flawed services.

History

School

  • Business and Economics

Department

  • Business

Published in

Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science

Volume

43

Issue

4

Pages

512 - 527

Citation

MIKOLON, S., QUAISER, B. and WIESEKE, J., 2015. Don’t try harder: using customer inoculation to build resistance against service failures. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 43(4), pp. 512-527.

Publisher

© Academy of Marketing Science. Published by Springer

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2014-07-03

Publication date

2014-08-13

Notes

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science. The final authenticated version is available online at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-014-0398-1

ISSN

0092-0703

eISSN

1552-7824

Language

  • en