The effects of service failure severity on consumer's emotion, satisfaction and complaint intention

[[abstract]]Customer complaints from the service failure play the important role in marketing science. To business, reducing the service failure is a main procedure for quality control. To customer, the consumption experience of service failure often affects the successive behavior performance. The consumer behavior is a social behavior we therefore cannot discuss it without considering the social situation. Though the company can make profit from the group consumer, it is possible that the group consumer can have complains and do harm to the business if they dissatisfy the service encounter. That is, very little research has been conducted on the topic about the service failure. In addition, previous research has not investigated the varying levels of severity of the service failure. Hence, the principal purposes of this study are, therefore, to examine the relationships among severity of service failure, customers’ emotions, and post-purchase satisfactions and complaint intentions. A 3 (service failure severity: trifling, moderate, and sever) x 3 (emotions of others: not angry, angry, or extremely furious) x 2 (group size: large, small) factorial experimental design was utilized to test these hypotheses. The survey instrument consisted of questions assessing: (a) consumer emotions; (b) satisfaction and consumer complaint intention after the service failure; (c) scenarios realism; and (d) demographics of the sample. We used analysis of variance (ANOVA) and structural equation model (SEM) for data analysis. A total of 324 undergraduate students participated in the study. Two hundred and ninety-three questionnaires were deemed valid after data housekeeping. The results indicated service failure severity had significant direct effect on negative emotion, positive emotion and satisfaction. Negative emotion and positive emotion had significant direct effect on satisfaction and complaint intentions. In addition, satisfaction had significant negative effect on complaint intentions. Finally, negative emotion and positive emotion had significant indirect effect on complaint intentions. Most hypotheses were confirmed by the result of analysis. Suggestions for further study and limitations were discussed at the end of the study.