Executive Summary

In this study, we investigate customers’ responses to an interactional failure, which is a failure caused by the manner in which frontline employees treat the customer (e.g., being rude, inattentive, or unfriendly). Research has shown that these types of failures are both frequent and potentially fatal to customer relationships, representing a major cause of unsatisfactory service and customer switching. Despite the frequency and damaging consequences of interactional failures, very little research has examined how customers respond to these failures.

We examine interactional failures in the context of a service pseudorelationship, in which a customer interacts with different frontline employees across encounters with a service organization. A service pseudorelationship is common with large organizations that have multiple locations and high employee turnover (e.g., airlines, franchise restaurants, mail order firms, or hotel chains). This context is important because customers often perceive these relationships as more impersonal and less central to their relationships with the organization. Because interactional failures are unambiguously caused by the behavior of frontline employees, it is important to know to what extent a negative response to the offending employee generalizes to the organization in this context.

We conducted two field experiments to investigate the effects of interactional failures. In Study 1 the interactional failures involved different degrees of employee inattentiveness experienced by a customer during check-in for an airline flight. For study 2, the failures involved a hotel employee who was, to different degrees, unhelpful and rude. We collected data from adults who were seated at departure gates waiting for flights at two major international airports in the United States.

Our findings demonstrate the importance of organizational attributions for understanding when customers hold organizations accountable for the failures caused by their employees in a pseudorelationship. Predictably, our results indicate that customers are dissatisfied with organizations when their frontline employees treat them poorly. However, the degree of that dissatisfaction depends upon the attributions that customers make about the failure. Specifically, when customers perceive that these problems are less global throughout the organization or less controllable by the organization, their overall dissatisfaction with the organization is lessened.

Our results establish that the severity of the failure and the quality of the customers’ past service with the organization are important antecedents of attributions of globality. Specifically, we find that as the severity of the interactional failure increases, customers perceive it to be less global and more employee-specific. Evidence also suggests that better quality past service diminishes customers’ perceptions that the failure is a global problem.

Because attributions of globality are especially important in these pseudorelationships, managers might consider communications intended to reduce those attributions following an interactional failure. Statements about the exceptional nature of the failure might accomplish this objective and reduce dissatisfaction with the organization. The distinction between the employee and organization may also have important implications for the recovery attempted after an interactional failure. Research on service failures has shown that the effectiveness of recovery activities is contingent upon what type of failure (process or outcome) has occurred. If customers discriminate between the organization and employee, then who performs the recovery (e.g., a manager or the offending employee apologizing to the customer) may also change its effectiveness.