Service Provider Responses to Anxious and Angry Customers: Different Challenges, Different Payoffs

Kalyani Menon & Laurette Dube

This paper examines how service providers tend to respond to customer anger and anxiety – two of the more frequently experienced negative customer emotions, and the subsequent impact on customer evaluation of provider performance and their satisfaction with the service. While it is well-established that attentive and responsive service providers have a significant positive impact on customer service experience, providers may face specific challenges when responding to customer anger and anxiety. For instance, research has established that customer anger occurs when customers perceive that service providers are responsible for a service related negative event. These attributions of causality are also accompanied by specific customer perceptions of their ability to cope with such a situation. Angry customers believe they can potentially alter and/or seek remedy for the negative event. Such perceptions of high coping potential often translates in to confrontive, aggressive behavior towards service providers. Anxious customers, on the other hand, believe the negative event occurred due to uncontrollable circumstances and they perceive themselves as unable to alter the situation in any way i.e., they believe they have low coping potential. This translates in to behaviors such as distancing themselves from the event. Given that anger and anxiety indicate two such distinctive experiences for customers, we hypothesize that provider ability and proclivity to respond to these emotions will be very different. Further, the impact of provider responses on customer evaluation and satisfaction will also differ depending on whether the response is to customer anger or anxiety.

We surveyed 198 air travel passengers and asked them for details of past episodes of anxiety and anger during air travel. The results confirmed our hypotheses and also highlight the potential payoff and significant challenges involved in the systematic design and delivery of appropriate provider responses to these customer emotions. In keeping with our theorizing, we found that service providers were less likely to respond appropriately to angry customers than they were to anxious customers who were more likely to receive assistance, reassurance, comfort and other supportive responses. Managers would do well to factor the highly contagious nature of anger into their provider response training programs. When faced with the aggressive, confrontive coping techniques of angry customers, service providers appear to get defensive, or worse, get confrontive with the customers. Provider training may need to complement the current rational, functional-oriented service recovery strategies aimed at retaining customers with training in emotion management. Managers may, for instance, incorporate role play exercises into training programs to make providers more aware of their potentially aggressive responses to angry customers. Providers may also need to be equipped with different psychological and interpersonal strategies such as distancing themselves from the outrage expressed by angry customers so as to minimize the contagious effect of anger. Diminishing the intensity of customer anger so as to make them more receptive to appropriate provider responses may be achieved by training in perspective taking such as expressing empathy and a true understanding of the impact of the negative event on the customer’s service experience. A case can also be made for the design and execution of communication strategies aimed at training customers on the adverse effects of expressing their anger in a confrontive way and providing them with alternative ways to express their needs to service providers.

Turning to anxiety, even though there were more support providing responses to this emotion than to anger, we found that only one anxious customer out of three received supportive responses. A potential reason for this may well be that anxious customers with their low coping potential do not express their emotions or demand any response to their emotion thus making it difficult for providers to identify and respond to the needs of anxious customers. Considering anxious customers do value supportive responses and translate these into higher satisfaction, important payoffs may result from ensuring the occurrence of these responses. It may serve managers to develop a script detailing context specific cues – such as vocal, facial and postural cues - to identify customer anxiety. Service providers may be trained to read and interpret these more subtle cues and be more proactive rather than reactive in their responses to customer anxiety.

For both anger and anxiety, the intensity with which negative emotions were experienced was not significantly related to customer satisfaction with the service encounters. Instead, customer evaluation of provider response drove satisfaction. While it seems possible for providers to curb the deleterious effects of negative emotions by appropriate responses, our results suggest that the payoff, in terms of higher evaluation of provider responses and subsequent customer service satisfaction, are higher for anxiety than for anger. This finding indicating the greater challenge of recovering from customer anger than customer anxiety points to a need to minimize the very occurrence of customer anger. Since anger occurs when customers hold the provider responsible for negative service events, there may be a need for greater proactive communication from providers to customers regarding the reasons for negative events and their own responsibility or lack of it in the event.

This research highlights the need for service providers to be cognizant of the distinctive nature of a range of customer emotions and to engineer effectively adaptive response strategies. Beyond anger and anxiety, it is equally possible that similar differences exist for other negative emotion experiences (e.g., sadness, loneliness, embarrassment), and therefore are likely to require provider responses, also with distinctive challenges and payoffs. The most effective providers may well be those who can recognize these different emotions in the customers as the service transaction unfolds and design their intervention accordingly. We hope this research will prompt significant practice and research development toward such an adaptive approach to provider responses to customer emotions.