How outraged customers react : from the antecedents to the consequences of customer rage emotions in service failure and intervention strategies

Abstract

Outraged customers experience the unfair treatment commonly across the world in various industries. But only a small number of studies provide comprehensive measures of the customer rage construct and associated behaviours. Addressing this issue, the present research focuses on four objectives: (1) to develop and empirically test the scale of customer rage; (2) to identify the mediators of customer rage in the service context.; (3) to clarify the concepts of customer rage and rage behaviours, and to empirically test casual relationships between them; (4) to investigate the intervention strategies in different contexts of rage emotions and test the efficiency with diverse rage behaviours. The research adopts a mixed research method, consisting of preliminary qualitative interviews, and a quantitative survey. A measurement scale of customer rage is developed and empirically evaluated, following the established scale development procedure. The conceptual framework of customer rage and associated behaviours is tested with a structural equation model. Results reveal two different types of rage emotions, i.e. impulsive and forethought rage, and three mediators of the relationship between service failure and rage emotions, i.e. anger, betrayal and frustration. Seven rage behaviours and fifteen intervention tactics are tested in the model. Positive relationships are found between two types of rage emotions and different behaviours. Eleven out of fifteen intervention strategies are found to have buffering effects and thirteen out fifteen are found to have amplifying effects on the links between rage emotions and behaviours. This research contributes to the academics by establishing the scales of two customer rage emotions and figuring out the causal relationships with rage behaviours. It implies to the managers that the efficiency of the same intervening tactics may vary on different time and targets where the intervention take place.