The Role Of Trust In Customer Service Attributions

Service attribution refers to customers'explanations to certain service experiences. Extant literature has provided us with rich knowledge on the critical role of service attribution in shaping customers'post service evaluations and behavior (e.g., satisfaction, word of mouth and switching behavior), but still little is known on how customers make causal attributions. In real service setting, because of the nature of service, such as intangibility, variability, inseparability, and perishability, the information of the real causes of certain service outcome is always neither observable nor available. Customers have to subjectively inference, rather than objectively "see" the causes of service outcomes. Our research questions are how customers make causal attributions? what are the psychological mechanisms through which attributions are made? and can service provider positively influence service attributions.We introduced customers'existing trust in explaining service attributions. We explored the up-mentioned research questions by three separate but internally correlated studies. The main findings are as follows. (1) Customer existing trust has systematic effects on customers'service attributions by influencing both the heuristic and system processing. High trust is related to positive attributions, whereas low trust is related to negative attributions. (2) Diagnosticity and attitude ambivalence partially mediate the attributions of negatively and positively valence service experiences, but the mediation effect is different for high and low trust customers. (3) Overall, Service marketing mix factors, such as tangibility, customer participation and service recovery efforts, have positive effects on customer service failure attribution, though the effects are moderated by customer trust.Based on recent progress in dual-process theories of attribution and other related theories on information processing, together with empirical evidences in marketing and consumer behavior literature, we proposed the model of trust heuristics and dual-processing in service attributions. In this model, we suggest that service attribution is the combination of more automatic, unconscious process and more systematic, controlled process, in which customer trust affect both process. Trust influence unconscious process by anchoring attributions on trust congruent causes and influence systematic process, if cognitive resources is available, by retrieving trust relevant beliefs to reinforce the anchored attributions. Thus we predict positivity effect of attribution in high trust customers but negativity effect of low trust customers. Several experiments of different service setting generally support our hypotheses:High trust customers tend to attribute negative service experiences to external, unstable factors whereas attribute positive service experiences to internal, stable factors. The inverse attribution pattern is true for low trust customers.In another study, we introduced information diagnosticity and attitude ambivalence in explaining the psychological mechanisms of service attributions. Two experiments results consistently provide evidence that high trust customers weight more on positive service experience as compared to low trust customers, whereas low trust customers weight more on negative experience as compared to high trust customers. The experiments also indicate that when service outcome is incongruent with existing trust, attitude ambivalence is aroused. Further mediation analysis reveal that only attitude ambivalence partially mediates the attributions of high trust customers, while both attitude ambivalence and diagnosticity partially mediate the attributions of low trust customers.We also investigated the roles of service marketing mix factors in customers' service failure attributions. Survey results indicate that while tangibility of service, and service recovery efforts have positive effects on both responsibility and stability attributions, customer participation has only a positive effect on stability attribution but has a negative effect on responsibility attribution. Multi-group analyses also reveal that trust moderate the effects of the marketing mix variables on service failure attribution.The theoretical and managerial implications of our findings are also discussed.