Diffusing Customer Anger in Service Recovery: A Conceptual Framework

Knowing how to handle angry customers following a service failure is an important aspect of a service provider’s work role. This paper presents a conceptual framework to help marketing academics and managers better understand: (1) how customer anger is provoked by a service failure; and (2) how customer anger may be reduced through using specific service recovery attempts by service providers. Specifically, we propose a two-phase conceptual model incorporating pre-service recovery (Phase 1) and service recovery (Phase 2). We argue that in Phase 1, an external cause produces anger and that cognitive appraisal is undertaken specifically in terms of: (a) goal relevance; (b) goal incongruence; and (c) ego-involvement – and this moderates the intensity of anger experienced by the customer. In Phase 2, we argue that customer anger can be reduced if the service provider undertakes the following: (a) listening; (b) engaging in blame displacement; and (c) providing an apology to the customer.