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Don’t try harder: using customer inoculation to build resistance against service failures

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Abstract

Capitalizing on a large-scale field experimental dataset involving 1,254 airline customers, this study introduces customer inoculation as a new, proactive strategy for mitigating the negative consequences that service failures have on customer satisfaction. Results confirm that customer inoculation eases the decrease in satisfaction when customers experience a service failure. Additional analyses indicate that customer inoculation does not harm customer satisfaction if no service failure occurs. This finding sets inoculation apart from expectation management and underscores the potential inoculation has for marketing practice. Furthermore, contrary to traditional recovery strategies for addressing service failures, customer inoculation operates in advance of a service failure and thereby circumvents potential drawbacks of traditional strategies. In sum, customer inoculation represents a novel strategy for addressing service failures with respect to existing marketing literature and expands the scope of action for companies when they cannot avoid offering occasionally flawed services.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sales & Marketing Department, Ruhr-University of Bochum, 44780, Bochum, Germany

    Sven Mikolon & Jan Wieseke

  2. FOM Hochschule für Oekonomie & Management Berlin, 10265, Berlin, Germany

    Benjamin Quaiser

  3. European School of Management and Technology, Berlin, Germany

    Jan Wieseke

  4. Loughborough University, Leicestershire, UK

    Jan Wieseke

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  1. Sven Mikolon
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  2. Benjamin Quaiser
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  3. Jan Wieseke
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Correspondence to Jan Wieseke.

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Sven Mikolon, Benjamin Quaiser, and Jan Wieseke contributed equally to this article. Author order was decided by coin flips. The authors thank Till Haumann for his very helpful comments on previous drafts of this paper.

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Mikolon, S., Quaiser, B. & Wieseke, J. Don’t try harder: using customer inoculation to build resistance against service failures. J. of the Acad. Mark. Sci. 43, 512–527 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-014-0398-1

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