Negative word of mouth intentions during self-service technology failures: The mediating role of regret
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Negative Word of Mouth Intentions During Self-Service Technology Failures: The Mediating Role of Regret
Seo Young Kim
Received: 18 January 2016 / Accepted: 29 April 2016 / Published: 24 June 2016 © The Society of Service Science and Springer 2016
ABSTRACT Adoption of self-service technologies (SSTs) is changing the current service landscape in many ways. However, most previous research focused on customer’s acceptance of such technologies, neglecting the consequences of technology adoption. In the current research, a specific behavioral consequence, negative word of mouth (NWOM) during SST failure is investigated. Through an experimental study, the effect of SST failure on customer’s NWOM intentions and the underlying mechanism of the relationship are demonstrated. Specifically, customers who have experienced SST failures were more likely to engage in NWOM because of the heightened regret felt at the moment, which is a specific negative emotion associated with self-blame. In addition, the moderated mediation effect of an individual difference, fear of negative evaluation is suggested to moderate the relationship between regret and NWOM intentions. Taken together, the current research highlights the role of a negative emotion during service failures. KEYWORDS Self-Service Technology (SST), Service Failure, Regret, Negative Word-of-Mouth(NWOM), Fear of Negative Evaluation.
Seo Young Kim ( ) College of Business Administration, Seoul National University, Korea e-mail: [email protected]
42 Seo Young Kim
1. INTRODUCTION With most companies adopting self-service technologies (SSTs) to replace their traditional services, customers are becoming more familiar with using technologies to serve themselves. Adoption of these technologies is beneficial to the firms as well as customers. Increased use of SSTs enable firms to reduce their labor costs (Curran and Meuter 2005), and increase profit through increased customer order size (Gavett 2015). Customers also benefit from faster service that is available outside normal business hours. However, there is also a downside to this technological advance. According to IBM’s survey on self-services (2007), 69% of the customers reported that they have experienced technical difficulties with their self-service devices. With higher risks of failures during SST usage (Zeithaml and Bitner 2003), more customers are experiencing SST failures. Unlike humans, it is hard for technology to react immediately to failures until customers speak up the issue, and thus timely recovery is difficult during SST failures. If service failure is not recovered in a timely manner, customer’s negative emotions might continue for a longer period of time, causing them to engage in different negative behavioral responses, such as negative word of mouth (NWOM), switching, and complaining. Thus, failures during SST usage are even more detrimental to the firms compared to failures during traditional services. In the current service landscape where technology is replacing the traditional services, it is necess
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