A good telling-off! A study of customer reprimand strategies

Purpose Customer misbehavior can severely impact on bystanders’ evaluations, emotions and behaviors. This paper aims to examine the impact of organizational responses to customer misbehavior on bystanding customers. The authors study the effects of reprimand courtesy, personalization and motive statements on bystanding customer emotions, deontic justice perceptions, avoidance desires and prosocial behavioral intentions. Design/methodology/approach This paper presents four scenario-based experiments in airlines and restaurants to gauge the effect of organizational responses to customer-instigated failures on bystanding customers. Confirmatory factor analysis is applied to assess the reliability, and convergent and discriminant validity of the perceptual measures and PROCESS analysis is applied to construct serial mediation, parallel mediation and moderation models to test our hypotheses. Findings Study 1 indicates that polite and less polite reprimands of transgressors and general announcements reduce bystanding customers’ avoidance desires. However, reprimands and general announcements do not appear to raise prosocial behavioral intentions. Studies 2 and 3 extend the focal relationships in Study 1 to a different context. Study 4 indicates that customers’ blame of the firm moderates the outcomes of motive statements within general announcements. Research limitations/implications This study indicates that tactics to reduce customers’ avoidance desires do not encourage customers’ prosocial behavioral intentions. Practical implications Firm representatives should use statements of less selfish firm motives when customers attribute more blame to the firm. Originality/value This paper provides a deontic justice and attribution based explanation of how customer reprimands impact on bystanding customers. Moreover, this paper highlights how recovery strategies should reflect interactions between recovery tactics and attributions, and the trade-offs between recovery outcomes.