Limiting Negative Effects of Interruptions in Commercial Interaction by Salespeople Explanations: An Abstract

Abstract

Imagine a common retail situation: An employee is meeting with a customer and the phone rings. The employee answers it. Does the customer consider this minor interruption to be a service failure? If so, how should the employee address the issue? Drawing from the literature on retail atmosphere and service failures, this research investigates how (1) service interruptions impact customer perceptions of service and (2) employees can mitigate the negative impact of service interruptions through verbal justifications.

The model developed in this research proposes that a cold call service interruption negatively impacts customer outcomes by reducing interactional justice and by causing negative emotions. First, if a retail employee answers a phone call during a customer interaction, the customer is likely to feel it is unfair that the call has taken priority over providing service to the instore customer. Hence, customers may feel that the caller has been allowed to “cut in line.” Second, wait times can induce negative customer emotions, particularly when the wait is unexpected. Retail employees can verbally address failures using four styles: apologizing to the customer, deflecting the employee’s responsibility in the failure, justifying the legitimacy of the service failure, and comparing the failure with the experience of other people. Previous literature has shown that the apology is the most effective.

This research uses three experiments. In the first experiment, the impact of service interruption and wait time on customer outcomes is evaluated using 100 MBA students from France. The findings show that even short wait times (e.g., “please hold”) increase perceived interactional injustice and reduce affect emotions. In the second experiment, six methods of addressing an interruption are tested using 141 French consumers. Consistent with previous literature, the apology reduced interactional injustice more than other justifications. However, it did not mitigate customer negative emotions. The third experiment investigates how employee emotional response to the caller on the phone impacts customer emotion. Based on the concept of emotional contagion, if the employee is pleasant and helpful to the caller, the customer should feel less negative emotion from the interruption than if the employee appears annoyed at the interruption. Using a sample of 57 US students, the findings show that employee emotional state on the phone does impact customer emotion. Combined, the results indicate that employees should try to act pleasantly toward callers, even when they interrupt service interactions, and then employees should apologize to the customer when the call has ended.

This research was partially funded by the AMS-AFM Research Grant.