Redoubling Emotions: An Analysis of Customers’ Emotional Patterns Following Service Failure and Recovery

Complaint handling research has traditionally studied customer emotional reactions following a service failure or a service recovery. To see how the combined effect of emotional responses occurring after a service failure and after a service recovery affects overall satisfaction and satisfaction with complaint handling we conducted an experiment. Our findings indicate that experiencing redoubled emotions in a service failure/recovery situation has a stronger effect on overall satisfaction and satisfaction with complaint handling than experiencing one single emotion. Our findings also show that different combinations of emotional responses (e.g. negative after failure - positive after recovery, negative after failure – negative after recovery) modulate satisfaction judgments.