When excessive service turns bad: Service alignment for transaction-specific needs

Abstract

Service firms strive to meet and exceed customers' expectations, but more services are not always welcome. To answer the question why extra services may not always lead to positive service evaluations, we examined the effectiveness of service alignment with transaction-specific needs as a reference standard for service evaluations and challenged the central tenet of expectancy disconfirmation theory. The service alignment model was experimentally evaluated in a normal service (Study 1) and a service failure setting (Study 2). We found that service evaluations depend critically on the degree to which services are aligned to the customer's transaction-specific needs and that this finding was generalizable across normal and service failure situations. Study 3 addresses the question of whether the three step behavioral process (i.e., comparison antecedents ➔ disconfirmation ➔ evaluations) of expectancy disconfirmation theory is tenable when applied to a different comparison standard (i.e., transaction-specific needs). We discuss the new boundary conditions of expectancy disconfirmation theory and provide suggestions for future investigations.