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

1. 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

4. 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.

5. 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

6. What we know (cont) • All of this has a negative impact on the organisation’s bottom line • But more overt behaviours can result in verbal intimidation, damage to the organisation’s property and or its people – frontline employees, other customers and the customer themselves

7. 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.

8. 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

9. What other studies show • Theory of psychological stress and coping (Lazarus and Folkman 1984) • Two key processes • cognitive appraisal • coping

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

11. What other studies show • Cognitive appraisal • Goal relevance (implication for my wellbeing) • Goal congruence (thwarts my goals) • Ego involvement aspects of one’s self identity and self esteem

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

13. Our studies • Part 1 Surveys with customers and employees • Part 2 depth interviews in four countries

14. 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)

15. 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

16. 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

17. Rage Incident Characteristics • Customer Data • types of organisations • telecommunications, airlines, retail, banks, restaurants and cafes • incident timing • <1 month to 10 years (median=6 months) • encounter mode • 70% in person, 27 % phone, 3% on-line • length of relationship with organisation • <1 month to 20 years (median=12 months)

18. Rage Incident Characteristics • Employee Data • type of organisation • 84% current org, 16% previous org • incident timing • <1 month to 14 years (median=6 months) • encounter mode • 23% in person, 77% phone, 0% on-line • length of employment with organisation • <1 month to 42 years (median=24 months)

19. “Kill you”

20. “Blow you all up”

21. Threw products at staff

22. Enraged then forcibly removed

23. Part 2 • Used critical incident technique • To explore the circumstances surrounding extreme anger • 50 interviews in US, China, Thailand and Australia

24. 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

25. Escalation of emotions • Initial surprise followed by concern, then annoyance and frustration and finally extreme anger accompanied by rage expressions

26. 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 didn’t seem to care, couldn’t 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…”

27. 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”

28. Perceived threats to self-esteem • “The customer service rep didn’t care… They weren’t helpful. They just followed the script” • “The whole store treats people like garbage…”

29. Customers expect to be treated fairly • If they feel they are not being treated fairly they become angry and mistrustful

30. 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 customerhas put into this • But you can make a difference

31. 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?

32. What can you do about it? • Treat the customer with respect • Make the customer feel valued • Make customer feel they have dignity • It’s not only what you do but what you don’t do they makes a difference • “Sins of omission”

33. 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

34. 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

35. Sins of Omission and socio-emotional benefits • what you could and should have done and the customer’s perceived emotional benefits is what counts • you make the difference!