Customer Anger: can should we do anything about it

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Customer Anger can (should) we do anything about
it?

• Professor Janet R. McColl-Kennedy
• Director of Research
• Professor of Marketing
• UQ Business School, University of Queensland
• 1 June 2007

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Importance

• Anger is frequently experienced in our daily
  lives, especially at work
• Anger is the most commonly experienced negative
  emotion in service encounters.
• It can result in harmful and destructive
  behaviours.
• Doctors, psychologists, and other health
  professionals have long understood the importance
  of dealing with negative emotions, especially
  anger.

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What we know

• Considerable attention has been given to the
  study of anger in the social psychology and
  organisational behaviour literatures.
• When individuals experience anger they exhibit a
  tendency to want to attack the target verbally
  and/or non-verbally.
• Often this results in non-confrontational
  behaviours such as exiting, boycotting, negative
  word of mouth, complaints to third parties as
  well as sabotage

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What we know (cont)

• All of this has a negative impact on the
  organisations bottom line
• But more overt behaviours can result in verbal
  intimidation, damage to the organisations
  property and or its people frontline employees,
  other customers and the customer themselves

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Rationale

• Current conceptualisations of consumption-related
  negative emotions do not address extreme anger
  (Richins 1997)
• limited to angry, frustrated, irritated
• Little is known about the causes, contexts and
  consequences of extreme customer anger (Grove et
  al 2004)
• This needs to be examined in more depth because
  the stakes for organisations are high.

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Our work

• Aim
• to understand the psychological processes that
  propel some consumers to extreme anger, including
  rage so that employees can avoid/reduce negative
  consequences

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What other studies show

• Theory of psychological stress and coping
  (Lazarus and Folkman 1984)
• Two key processes
• cognitive appraisal
• coping

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What other studies show

• In stressful life events
• Cognitive appraisal
• individuals evaluate whether the encounter is
  relevant to their well-being (eg
  harmful/beneficial)
• Whats at stake
• Is there possible harm or threat to my values,
  commitments, or goals?

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What other studies show

• Cognitive appraisal
• Goal relevance (implication for my wellbeing)
• Goal congruence (thwarts my goals)
• Ego involvement aspects of ones self identity
  and self esteem

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What other studies show

• Coping
• (what you do to tolerate/minimise a stressful
  encounter)
• Emotion focused coping
• Problem focused (alter the troubled
  environment-person)

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Our studies

• Part 1 Surveys with customers and employees
• Part 2 depth interviews in four countries

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Part 1

• Customer Sample
• Customers who have experienced rage following a
  service failure encounter
• 140 student consumers in the U.S., Australia, and
  Thailand
• Employee Sample
• Employees who have witnessed first hand and/or
  been the target of a customer rage episode
• 83 employees from three organisations in
  Australia (electricity utility, bank, pharmacy
  chain)

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Context

• Focus on customer rage triggered by a service
  failure on the part of an organisation
• Does not include rage induced by other customers
• Explore rage from both customer and employee
  perspectives

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Method

• Survey
• Two-part questionnaires
• Part I - Critical-Incident-Technique-based
  questions requiring open-ended responses
• Part II Batteries of structured questions
  assessing customer rage spectrum emotions,
  expressions, and behaviours
• Different versions for customers and employees
• Distributed to separate (unrelated) convenience
  samples of customer and employee respondents

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Rage Incident Characteristics

• Customer Data
• types of organisations
• telecommunications, airlines, retail, banks,
  restaurants and cafes
• incident timing
• lt1 month to 10 years (median6 months)
• encounter mode
• 70 in person, 27 phone, 3 on-line
• length of relationship with organisation
• lt1 month to 20 years (median12 months)

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Rage Incident Characteristics

• Employee Data
• type of organisation
• 84 current org, 16 previous org
• incident timing
• lt1 month to 14 years (median6 months)
• encounter mode
• 23 in person, 77 phone, 0 on-line
• length of employment with organisation
• lt1 month to 42 years (median24 months)

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Kill you
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Blow you all up
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Threw products at staff
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Enraged then forcibly removed
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Part 2

• Used critical incident technique
• To explore the circumstances surrounding extreme
  anger
• 50 interviews in US, China, Thailand and Australia

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What we found

• Series of service encounters related to the same
  incident
• Occurred over a period of time
• Double (multiple) deviation initial failure and
  then failure again in recovery attempt
• Anger and accompanying rage expression only
  surfaced after several attempts to have the
  problem resolved

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Escalation of emotions

• Initial surprise followed by concern, then
  annoyance and frustration and finally extreme
  anger accompanied by rage expressions

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Sense of helplessness

• 37 year old female customer of an Australian
  insurance company made 11 calls to a call centre
  and two in-store visits in a 5 week period to
  find out when she would get her 500 refund
• Unwillingness to help, staff didnt seem to care,
  couldnt be bothered to read the file notes
• On the 5th encounter she felt
• sense of helplessness, no one would listen to
  me I felt I had no control any longer over what
  was happening

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Perceived threats to fairness

• A sense of injustice or being treated unfairly
• I was being cheated
• I felt cheated by the airline because they had
  taken my money and now they wanted me to pay
  again
• I felt betrayed by XXXXX

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Perceived threats to self-esteem

• The customer service rep didnt care They
  werent helpful. They just followed the script
• The whole store treats people like garbage

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Customers expect to be treated fairly

• If they feel they are not being treated fairly
  they become angry and mistrustful

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What can (should) you do about it?

• We often recognise the investment an organisation
  makes in delivering the service but think what
  effort and time the customer has put into this
• But you can make a difference

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What can you do about it?

• First, put yourself in their shoes
• How would I feel?
• What would I feel like doing?
• Acknowledge their views/feelings (show empathy)
• Think counterfactually
• How could this be done differently?
• Could I do more?
• What should I do in this situation?

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What can you do about it?

• Treat the customer with respect
• Make the customer feel valued
• Make customer feel they have dignity
• Its not only what you do but what you dont do
  they makes a difference
• Sins of omission

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Service Recovery Sins of Omission

• The service provider had other options available
  to resolve this service problem
• The service provider could have done more to
  resolve the service problem
• The service provider could have easily found a
  better solution to this service problem
• It is really easy to imagine how the service
  provider could have solved this problem using a
  solution that was better for the customer
• The service provider should have used another
  option to resolve this problem
• The service provider should have done more to
  resolve this service problem

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Sins of Omission and socio-emotional benefits

• Sins of omission (what you could and should have
  done) and socio-emotional benefits (making the
  customer feel valued, respected, have dignity)
  mediates the relationship between fairness of the
  outcome and customer anger

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Sins of Omission and socio-emotional benefits

• what you could and should have done and the
  customers perceived emotional benefits is what
  counts
• you make the difference!