Anna S. Mattila & Paul G. Patterson

The Impact of Culture on Consumers’ Attributions and Service Recovery Perceptions Executive Summary Internationalization of services has gained considerable momentum in recent years. Although cultural competence might be one of the key components in delivering superior service to today’s global customers, our understanding of how customers from different countries evaluate service experiences is very limited. To fill that gap, the broad purpose of this study is to examine the role of culture in consumers’ perceptions of service failures. More specifically, we use the contrast between independence (typically a trait of US consumers) and interdependence (typically associated with East Asians) to better understand the major differences between East Asian and American customers’ evaluations of failed service encounters.

The independent notion of self dominant in North America assumes that the person is a stable entity who is largely in control of his/her behavior. Accordingly, Westerners tend to attribute people’s behaviors to internal or dispositional qualities of the individual, even when the behavior is obviously caused by situational factors. In this study, we propose that offering a causal explanation for a service failure will force Westerners to pay attention to the context or situation surrounding the service failure (e.g., service failure due to unavoidable staff shortages, or some random systems failure). Conversely, due to their more interdependent notion of self and holistic thinking, East Asians are likely to focus on the context or the situation even when no explanation for the failure is provided. We further propose that culture might interfere with the importance of compensation in mitigating the ill-effects of service failures. East- Asians tend to emphasize avoidance of losses whereas Westerners typically are more interested in individual gains. Consequently, offering tangible compensation should have a more positive effect on American rather than East-Asian consumers’ post-recovery satisfaction.

To test our propositions, we manipulated explanations for service failure and compensation in a 2 (causal explanation: present or absent) by 2 (service recovery: compensation or no compensation) factorial design in two cultural contexts (Western versus East-Asian). To minimize socio-economic differences, university students from the US, Malaysia and Thailand served as study participants.

The findings of our study show that the differential sensitivity of East-Asian and American consumers to causal explanations influences their attributions for service failures. Specifically, offering an explanation for poor service reduced internal attributions while simultaneously increasing external attributions among the US sample. Conversely, an explanation had minimal impact on East-Asian consumers’ failure attributions. Moreover, offering tangible compensation (i.e., 20% discount) had a more positive effect on US participants than their East-Asian counterparts. Finally, our results indicate that offering an explanation for service failure also influences customer perceptions of employee effort – a critical antecedent to post-recovery satisfaction.

This study has several important managerial implications. Training customer contact employees to understand how to adapt service recovery efforts to the values of major cultural segments is needed to successfully compete in the 21st century. Noting the power of explanations in influencing American consumers’ attributions, service providers need to be trained to offer a genuine explanation for poor service when the failure is caused by external factors (e.g. unavoidable staff shortage due to illness; flight delay due to bad weather, etc). Our results indicate that such action can diminish the blame attributed to the firm and its staff, and thereby not effect overall perceptions of service quality. However a word of caution is in order. Any explanation that is perceived to be less than genuine and designed to deflect responsibility from the firm may backfire and have a particularly damaging impact on the firm’s reputation. So any apology needs to be sincere and genuine.

 Similarly, some form of tangible compensation is required to successfully recover from service failures in the US context. US consumers, due to their predominantly independent self-construal were found to be far more receptive to compensation. Thus service firms need policies that, within reason, empower front-line employees to provide limited compensation at their discretion. In contrast, for East-Asian consumers, a causal explanation has relatively little impact on where blame for the failure is attributed. For these consumers, front-line staff need to be aware that they are likely to prefer other remedies, such as a speedy resolution to the problem and a genuine apology from a manager (rather than say a front line receptionist) in order to regain ‘face’ in the eyes of their family and friends. East-Asians also have a lower tolerance to uncertain and ambiguous situations. Thus when a failure is being rectified, it is important that staffs are trained to provide the aggrieved customer with a sense of cognitive control by keeping them constantly informed of exactly what is being done to rectify the problem.