How do customers react to critical service encounters?: A cross-sectional perspective

Abstract

In recent research on service quality it has been argued that the construct of behavioural intentions and its relationship with other constructs are issues which require conceptual and empirical elaboration. In this paper, we focus on the development and refinement of a scale for measuring behavioural intentions and the influence of critical service incidents on these behavioural intentions of service customers. Moreover, we seek to provide evidence for differences across service industries with regard to dimensions of service quality that customers evaluate during a critical incident. The results of an empirical study of a large sample of customers from six different service industries suggest that there exist significant cross-sectional differences in critical dimensions of service quality, thereby supporting the notion that there are service industry-specific determinants of quality. Furthermore, we identified three dimensions of behavioural intentions: customer loyalty; price tolerance; and dissatisfaction response. It was found that the influence of incident-based quality, expressed as positive or negative, on behavioural intentions does not vary significantly from industry to industry, except for the public transportation industry. Service quality is positively related to customer loyalty and price tolerance and negatively related to dissatisfaction responses of customers. However, this incidental service quality does have a moderating effect on the general perceived quality-behavioural intentions relationship: higher general quality results in higher price tolerance and a lower dissatisfaction response for positive incidents than for negative encounters. With regard to customer loyalty, this difference is not convincing.