A Look into the (Not So) Bright Side of Life: An Exploration of the Negative Service Encounter and Its Effect on the Next Customer: An Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate the negative service encounter by aiming to understand how and if the employee’s negative service encounter experience affects the customer being served following that negative encounter. This exploratory study expands the understanding of the complex and multidimensional phenomenon of service-encounter spirals among customers and employees. The preliminary evidence sheds some light on how a negative encounter may affect the next customer in line. A qualitative approach was initially chosen to explore both positive and negative encounter spirals through multiple focus groups in which respondents described their working experiences. Three themes emerged after the analysis of the data, namely, maintaining the customer focus, long-lasting emotional impact of dysfunctional customer behavior, and informal coping mechanisms. The analysis of the data also showed that most of the respondents agreed that the vast majority of service encounters are of positive nature and their positive effect on employees’ psychological state does seem to last long. This preliminary finding challenges existing work in the area that strongly emphasizes the impact of customer citizenship activity on positive employee reactions and enhances their reciprocal intentions toward customers (Gong et al. 2013). The data also suggests that disruptive customer behaviors toward employees are more impactful than the positive ones. These preliminary findings pinpoint toward a more severe and long-lasting impact of dysfunctional behavior on employees’ mindset, confirming the initial expectations of the researchers that appropriate organizational responses should be developed so that employees avoid such disruptive experiences. Negative memorable experiences can throw employees off of their best practices. While respondents prioritize their customer consciousness over their intention to retaliate, however, a bad encounter can immensely ruin the positive things done up until then. A third interesting preliminary finding is that employees do not seem to follow any kind of formal or standardized processes, address to their line manager, or look for service scripts to overcome such disruptive incidents. Instead, they intuitively opt in for informal support from their peers. This is an important finding that companies should take into account when designing and implementing responses for such situations. More planning should be undertaken in the prevention of the trickle-down effect of a negative encounter, rather than merely reacting when a negative encounter happens. Businesses should focus on how to deal with negative encounters and thus protect their own employees and their customers and prevent the negative encounters theft would follow them.