心理契约视角下在线购物预防性服务补救对消费者宽恕的影响

Effect of online preventive service recovery strategies on consumer forgiveness from the perspective of psychological contract

“顾客沉默”导致的服务失败频繁发生,现有研究缺乏对预防性服务补救适用条件的界定及其潜在机制的深入研究。本研究基于服务补救理论和心理契约提出3个研究假设,构建了预防性服务补救对消费者宽恕的研究框架,通过实地实验和行为实验等三个实验,利用发货延迟、商品与图片展示不符等真实消费情境,通过方差分析和Bootstrapping分析进行实证分析。研究结果表明:网购情境下预防性服务补救对消费者宽恕和消费者满意具有积极影响,且预防性有形补救比心理补救更能激发消费者的宽恕意愿;心理契约和消费者移情在预防性服务补救和消费者宽恕之间发挥连续中介作用;品牌故事在预防性服务补救和消费者宽恕的影响中起调节作用。本研究结果丰富了预防性服务补救与消费者宽恕的理论研究,同时对企业制定合理的预防性服务补救策略提供了指导性的实践建议。

Even the most successful giant companies are inevitably making mistakes in marketing activities,it is important to recover consumers from service failure.Due to the prevalence of online service failures,effective service recovery strategies are crucial for service providers to achieve consumer satisfaction.Though mountainous research has shown that post-failure recovery can achieve consumer satisfaction,preventive service recovery strategies provide new insights for solving the puzzle of“customer silence”.Customer salience is referred to consumers who would like not to reach out to the company when service or product failure happens.How to mitigate the negative influence of service failures and obtain consumer forgiveness is important for companies to recover consumers and enhance consumer loyalty.Since it is critical for companies to sustain long-term relationships with their consumers,the current research focuses on understanding which form of preventive service recovery strategy is more effective for obtaining consumer forgiveness.Besides,forgiveness is a powerful human emotion and consumer forgiveness is crucial for companies to attenuate consumer negative attitudes and is a foundation for companies to restore relationships with consumers in the long term.Building on the theories of service recovery and psychological prevention,the current work examines the effect of preventive service recovery strategies on consumer forgiveness.When and why preventive service recovery strategy would be more efficient to recover consumers and obtain consumer?Are there any potential boundary conditions would moderate the effect of preventive service recovery strategy on consumer forgiveness?The current work proposed that the underlying mechanism of the effect of preventive service recovery on consumer forgiveness,is sequentially mediated by psychological contract and consumer empathy,respectively.Also,results suggested that the effect of preventive service recovery on consumer forgiveness is moderated by brand story(top dog brand vs.underdog brand),which is widely adopted in advertising communication by conveying brand history or brand identity.To examine the effects we proposed,the mix method was used(i.e.field experiment and behavioral experiment)to test the hypotheses we proposed,including several consumer consumption situations in real-world marketing activities,such as delivery delay and inconsistence between actual product and displayed pictures.ANOVA analysis and Bootstrapping analysis were used to test the main effect of preventive service recovery strategies on consumer forgiveness and the sequential mediating roles of psychological contract and empathy toward the company.Three experiments were conducted to test these hypotheses.Using an online shopping field experiment,Experiment 1 shows that preventive service recovery has a positive effect on consumer forgiveness and consumer satisfaction.Specifically,preventive economic recovery can elicit higher consumer forgiveness and satisfaction as compared to preventive emotional recovery.Experiment 2 demonstrates that preventive economic recovery strategy is more effective as compared to immediate recovery strategy,and preventive economic recovery leads to more consumer forgiveness and satisfaction as compared to preventive emotional recovery.Experiment 3 suggests that psychological contract and consumer empathy are the sequential mediators in the effect of preventive service recovery on consumer forgiveness.Besides,brand story plays an importantly moderating role in the effect of preventive service recovery on consumer forgiveness.Specifically,when consumers confront underdog brand story,the effect of preventive tangible remedies on consumer forgiveness was attenuated.When consumers confront top dog brand story,the effect of preventive service recovery strategies on consumer forgiveness remained.To sum,results across three experiments illustrate the effect of preventive service recovery on consumer forgiveness,the serial mediation of psychological contract and consumer empathy,and the boundary condition of brand story.At the same time,an in-depth discussion of mechanism was carried out to make up for the deficiencies of the existing literature.The current research makes several contributions to research and practically.Theoretically,our work contributes to the extant literature on preventive service recovery,psychological contract,consumer forgiveness,and brand story.In practice,the current work provides important practical implications for online retailers to recover service failures,improve company reputation,and enhance consumer satisfaction and consumer loyalty.Meanwhile,the current work demonstrates the limitation of our study and potential research questions for future research.