The impact of other‐customer failure on service satisfaction

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate how and why other‐customer misbehavior has a negative influence on customer satisfaction with the service firm.Design/methodology/approach – Data for this study were gathered by retrospective experience sampling.Findings – There are several important findings that can be obtained from the results. First, people consider another customer's failure to be the firm's responsibility when they perceive that the failure is under the firm's volitional control (i.e. controllability attribution). This controllability attribution leads to customer expectations of compensation for recovery from dissatisfaction. Second, stability attributions about other‐customer failures were not found to be significantly related to the firm's responsibility. Third, the severity of the other‐customer failure experience bears no relation to the customer's service recovery expectation, but it is negatively related to satisfaction. Finally, the customer's evaluation of service is not...