Don’t try harder using customer inoculation to bu

Authors: Sven Mikolon Benjamin Quaiser Jan Wieseke

Publish Date: 2014/08/13

Volume: 43, Issue: 4, Pages: 512-527

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Abstract

Capitalizing on a largescale field experimental dataset involving 1254 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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