Negative Services

Negative services are undesirable services for the customer, such as a root canal therapy of a dentist or maintenance services. Typically they are associated with negative emotions and involve mental, physical or material damages.

According to Morgan and Rao (2006) and Miller et al. (2009) the emotional experience is outstanding for customers’ evaluation of the service rather than the outcome. When the service process, due to the mood-congruency effect, is influenced or dominated by negative emotions or stress, customers tend to use the perceived emotions to evaluate the service. What they probably don’t recognize is that feelings might be caused by other aspects beyond the service providers’ control (e.g. an accident as the event which necessitates the negative service). This might bias the evaluation of the service.

Besides these difficulties, customers might not be able to engage in the service process (e.g. of medical services) due to fear, stress or missing knowledge about relevant information which could help the service provider to choose the right approach to the problem.

To achieve a positive evaluation of the situation or the service by customers, service providers can focus on customers coping with the underlying event. According to Gabbott et al. (2010) customer satisfaction can especially be obtained through emotion-focused coping. Emotion-focused coping can be achieved by a quest for social support or a positive reinterpretation of the situation. Humor might be useful to help customers reinterpret the situation as it was already found to be a stress-reducing coping strategy at the workplace.

In our research we plan to investigate humor as an antecedent and moderator for customer emotions and satisfaction regarding negative services. Thus, we want to investigate coping in stressful situations with special regards to the influence of humor.