2.4. Unfavorable/dissatisfying experiences
Although the concept of ‘‘terrible’’ customer experiences
has not been defined or studied in retail settings, past
research has focused on identifying dissatisfying (and satisfying)
incidents in service encounters. Bitner et al. (1990)
examined favorable and unfavorable service encounters,
based on the customer’s perspective, discovering that both
satisfactory and unsatisfactory incidents could be attributed
to one or more of three major types of employee behaviors:
how the employee responded to a service delivery failure,
how the employee responded to customer needs and
requests, and unprompted or unsolicited employee actions.
Bitner et al. (1994) later investigated the sources of satisfactory
and dissatisfactory service encounters from the
service employee’s viewpoint. The results of this study revealed four groups of satisfactory and dissatisfactory
incidents: how employees responded to failures, to problem
customers, and to requests, and unprompted action by
employees.
Schneider and Bowen (1999) made an interesting argument
that both customer delight and customer outrage stem
from perceived justice or injustice. In a retail setting, if the
customer’s needs for security, justice, and/or self-esteem are
violated in some way, a terrible shopping experience in
which the customer may become filled with outrage may
result. For example, a customer’s need for justice might be
violated if the customer was overcharged for an item or if a
salesperson made promises or commitments to a customer
that were later broken. A customer’s need for self-esteem
might be violated if salespeople were uncaring and rude or
did not seem interested in assisting the customer. These
situations may indeed lead the customer to endure a terrible
shopping experience.
Keaveney (1995) identified critical incidents in service
encounters that led to customer-switching behaviors. Among
customers’ reasons for switching were inconvenience, pricing,
core service failures, service encounter failures, employee
responses to service failures, ethical problems, attraction
by competitors, and involuntary switching. Ganesh et al.
(2000) also investigated customer-switching behavior in a
services (banking) context, distinguishing customers who
switched banks due to dissatisfaction from other groups of
customers. Finally, Kelley et al. (1993) identified types of
retail failures. Types of retail failures were categorized into
three groups: (1) employee responses to service delivery
system or product failures; (2) employee responses to customer
needs and requests; and (3) unprompted and unsolicited
employee actions.
Given this background and the fact that neither ‘‘delightful’’
nor ‘‘terrible’’ customer experiences in a retail shopping
context has been examined, this exploratory research
delves deeper into these issues by examining the factors that
produce delightful as well as terrible shopping experiences
for retail customers. The research method is discussed next,
followed by a presentation of the results.