اثرات نامتقارن احساسات مشتری بر رضایت و وفاداری در یک زمینه خدمات مطلوب  Asymmetric effects of customer emotions on satisfaction and loyalty in a utilitarian service context

1. Introduction Ensuring customer satisfaction and loyalty in the service industry is paramount for long-term corporate profits and success (Rust & Chung, 2006; White, 2010). The role of emotions, particularly of delight, in customer satisfaction and loyalty in hedonic services such as holidays or culinary experiences (Arnould & Price, 1993; Collier & Barnes, 2015; Hosany & Prayag, 2013), is a significant stream of research because customers approach these experiences with expectations of pleasure or excitement. In contrast, emotions have not figured much in studies of utilitarian service settings such as banking, health services or call-centers, where customers go to achieve routine or mundane tasks. Utilitarian services tend to focus on cognitive predictors of satisfaction and loyalty, like service quality (Rust & Oliver, 1994), or operational metrics such as waiting time, number of calls handled or problem resolution rate (Aksin, Armony, & Mehrotra, 2007). A general assumption in the services literature and in industry is that effective and efficient service performance leads to consumer satisfaction and loyalty. However, it is now undeniable that emotions ‘powerfully, predictably, and pervasively influence decision-making’ (Lerner, Li, Valdesolo, & Kassam, 2015, p. 802). We can therefore expect emotions to influence customer outcomes in any setting. This study sets out to look into the relationship between emotions and their influence on satisfaction and loyalty in utilitarian service environments. Why should we think that emotions have a role to play in service situations where customers use the service almost entirely for pragmatic reasons? In call-center settings, despite a lack of empirical evidence, the importance of customer emotions is implicit through references to customer ‘irritants’, ‘anxiety’, ‘frustration’ (Bennington, Cummane, & Conn, 2000; Peevers, McInnes, Morton, Matthews, & Jack, 2009) or even ‘agony’ (Whiting & Donthu, 2006). Some authors have suggested that emotions – particularly delight – are irrelevant (Dixon, Freeman, & Toman, 2010; Herington & Weaven, 2007; Loureiro & Roschk, 2014) in utilitarian contexts such as banking, mortgage or energy services. However, when we move away from the well-studied emotion of ‘delight’, some work indicates that other emotions can be important for customer outcomes such as satisfaction and loyalty in utilitarian service settings like cell-phone or telecommunications services or hospitals (Del Río-Lanza, Vázquez-Casielles, & Díaz-Martín, 2009; Dubé & Morgan, 1998; Haj-Salem & Chebat, 2014). The dearth of research in the area of emotions in call-centers may have arisen because the industry tends to use operational metrics such as waiting time or abandonment rates as adequate measures of service performance (Aksin et al., 2007), despite evidence that they do not predict important customer outcomes such as satisfaction (Feinberg, Hokama, Kadam, & Kim, 2002; Feinberg, Kim, Hokama, de Ruyter, & Keen, 2000). Emotions therefore appear to play some role in services designed to fulfill largely utilitarian needs (Del Río-Lanza et al., 2009; Dubé & Morgan, 1998; Haj-Salem & Chebat, 2014). However, the nature of those emotions may differ from those observed and studied in service environments designed to fulfill and exceed hedonic needs and expectations. This article addresses the issue of identifying context-specific emotions in a call-center setting, where customers generally wish to achieve utilitarian-focused goals such as solving problems with their service, or opening or managing their accounts. We further look into how those emotions impact satisfaction and loyalty. In particular, through identifying emotions as independent positive or negative dimensions, we are able to examine potential asymmetries in the effects of negative or positive emotions on satisfaction and loyalty.