Customer Anger: can should we do anything about it - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

1 / 35
About This Presentation
Title:

Customer Anger: can should we do anything about it

Description:

It can result in harmful and destructive behaviours. ... returned half an hour later and apologised and asked for the products back, they ... – PowerPoint PPT presentation

Number of Views:35
Avg rating:3.0/5.0
Slides: 36
Provided by: mccollk
Category:

less

Transcript and Presenter's Notes

Title: Customer Anger: can should we do anything about it


1
Customer Anger can (should) we do anything about
it?
  • Professor Janet R. McColl-Kennedy
  • Director of Research
  • Professor of Marketing
  • UQ Business School, University of Queensland
  • 1 June 2007

2
(No Transcript)
3
(No Transcript)
4
Importance
  • Anger is frequently experienced in our daily
    lives, especially at work
  • Anger is the most commonly experienced negative
    emotion in service encounters.
  • It can result in harmful and destructive
    behaviours.
  • Doctors, psychologists, and other health
    professionals have long understood the importance
    of dealing with negative emotions, especially
    anger.

5
What we know
  • Considerable attention has been given to the
    study of anger in the social psychology and
    organisational behaviour literatures.
  • When individuals experience anger they exhibit a
    tendency to want to attack the target verbally
    and/or non-verbally.
  • Often this results in non-confrontational
    behaviours such as exiting, boycotting, negative
    word of mouth, complaints to third parties as
    well as sabotage

6
What we know (cont)
  • All of this has a negative impact on the
    organisations bottom line
  • But more overt behaviours can result in verbal
    intimidation, damage to the organisations
    property and or its people frontline employees,
    other customers and the customer themselves

7
Rationale
  • Current conceptualisations of consumption-related
    negative emotions do not address extreme anger
    (Richins 1997)
  • limited to angry, frustrated, irritated
  • Little is known about the causes, contexts and
    consequences of extreme customer anger (Grove et
    al 2004)
  • This needs to be examined in more depth because
    the stakes for organisations are high.

8
Our work
  • Aim
  • to understand the psychological processes that
    propel some consumers to extreme anger, including
    rage so that employees can avoid/reduce negative
    consequences

9
What other studies show
  • Theory of psychological stress and coping
    (Lazarus and Folkman 1984)
  • Two key processes
  • cognitive appraisal
  • coping

10
What other studies show
  • In stressful life events
  • Cognitive appraisal
  • individuals evaluate whether the encounter is
    relevant to their well-being (eg
    harmful/beneficial)
  • Whats at stake
  • Is there possible harm or threat to my values,
    commitments, or goals?

11
What other studies show
  • Cognitive appraisal
  • Goal relevance (implication for my wellbeing)
  • Goal congruence (thwarts my goals)
  • Ego involvement aspects of ones self identity
    and self esteem

12
What other studies show
  • Coping
  • (what you do to tolerate/minimise a stressful
    encounter)
  • Emotion focused coping
  • Problem focused (alter the troubled
    environment-person)

13
Our studies
  • Part 1 Surveys with customers and employees
  • Part 2 depth interviews in four countries

14
Part 1
  • Customer Sample
  • Customers who have experienced rage following a
    service failure encounter
  • 140 student consumers in the U.S., Australia, and
    Thailand
  • Employee Sample
  • Employees who have witnessed first hand and/or
    been the target of a customer rage episode
  • 83 employees from three organisations in
    Australia (electricity utility, bank, pharmacy
    chain)

15
Context
  • Focus on customer rage triggered by a service
    failure on the part of an organisation
  • Does not include rage induced by other customers
  • Explore rage from both customer and employee
    perspectives

16
Method
  • Survey
  • Two-part questionnaires
  • Part I - Critical-Incident-Technique-based
    questions requiring open-ended responses
  • Part II Batteries of structured questions
    assessing customer rage spectrum emotions,
    expressions, and behaviours
  • Different versions for customers and employees
  • Distributed to separate (unrelated) convenience
    samples of customer and employee respondents

17
Rage Incident Characteristics
  • Customer Data
  • types of organisations
  • telecommunications, airlines, retail, banks,
    restaurants and cafes
  • incident timing
  • lt1 month to 10 years (median6 months)
  • encounter mode
  • 70 in person, 27 phone, 3 on-line
  • length of relationship with organisation
  • lt1 month to 20 years (median12 months)

18
Rage Incident Characteristics
  • Employee Data
  • type of organisation
  • 84 current org, 16 previous org
  • incident timing
  • lt1 month to 14 years (median6 months)
  • encounter mode
  • 23 in person, 77 phone, 0 on-line
  • length of employment with organisation
  • lt1 month to 42 years (median24 months)

19
Kill you
20
Blow you all up
21
Threw products at staff
22
Enraged then forcibly removed
23
Part 2
  • Used critical incident technique
  • To explore the circumstances surrounding extreme
    anger
  • 50 interviews in US, China, Thailand and Australia

24
What we found
  • Series of service encounters related to the same
    incident
  • Occurred over a period of time
  • Double (multiple) deviation initial failure and
    then failure again in recovery attempt
  • Anger and accompanying rage expression only
    surfaced after several attempts to have the
    problem resolved

25
Escalation of emotions
  • Initial surprise followed by concern, then
    annoyance and frustration and finally extreme
    anger accompanied by rage expressions

26
Sense of helplessness
  • 37 year old female customer of an Australian
    insurance company made 11 calls to a call centre
    and two in-store visits in a 5 week period to
    find out when she would get her 500 refund
  • Unwillingness to help, staff didnt seem to care,
    couldnt be bothered to read the file notes
  • On the 5th encounter she felt
  • sense of helplessness, no one would listen to
    me I felt I had no control any longer over what
    was happening

27
Perceived threats to fairness
  • A sense of injustice or being treated unfairly
  • I was being cheated
  • I felt cheated by the airline because they had
    taken my money and now they wanted me to pay
    again
  • I felt betrayed by XXXXX

28
Perceived threats to self-esteem
  • The customer service rep didnt care They
    werent helpful. They just followed the script
  • The whole store treats people like garbage

29
Customers expect to be treated fairly
  • If they feel they are not being treated fairly
    they become angry and mistrustful

30
What can (should) you do about it?
  • We often recognise the investment an organisation
    makes in delivering the service but think what
    effort and time the customer has put into this
  • But you can make a difference

31
What can you do about it?
  • First, put yourself in their shoes
  • How would I feel?
  • What would I feel like doing?
  • Acknowledge their views/feelings (show empathy)
  • Think counterfactually
  • How could this be done differently?
  • Could I do more?
  • What should I do in this situation?

32
What can you do about it?
  • Treat the customer with respect
  • Make the customer feel valued
  • Make customer feel they have dignity
  • Its not only what you do but what you dont do
    they makes a difference
  • Sins of omission

33
Service Recovery Sins of Omission
  • The service provider had other options available
    to resolve this service problem
  • The service provider could have done more to
    resolve the service problem
  • The service provider could have easily found a
    better solution to this service problem
  • It is really easy to imagine how the service
    provider could have solved this problem using a
    solution that was better for the customer
  • The service provider should have used another
    option to resolve this problem
  • The service provider should have done more to
    resolve this service problem

34
Sins of Omission and socio-emotional benefits
  • Sins of omission (what you could and should have
    done) and socio-emotional benefits (making the
    customer feel valued, respected, have dignity)
    mediates the relationship between fairness of the
    outcome and customer anger

35
Sins of Omission and socio-emotional benefits
  • what you could and should have done and the
    customers perceived emotional benefits is what
    counts
  • you make the difference!
Write a Comment
User Comments (0)
About PowerShow.com