Consumer Different Reactions To Service Delay Under Different Service Encounter Stage

With the increasing time cost of modern people, nowadays both the consumers and service providers value time much more than the past. Thus, the both sides of service encounters are unwilling to face the problem of service delay. From the service providers’ perspective, service delay would cause customer churn, and even worse, customers will start to visit their competitors. However, from the consumers’ perspective, they regard the waiting experience as a kind of negative consumption experience. Unfortunately, the problem of delay constantly occurs in tertiary industry. Besides, different consumers react differently when facing the service delay. And this leads to a thorny problem for managers.Based on this situation, we carry out the regulatory focus theory to explain the consumers’ waiting intention when facing the service delay. Previous research reports that promotion-focused consumers are motivated to pay attention to positive outcomes in the consumption process, while prevention-focused consumers are motivated to focus on negative outcomes in the consumption process. On the other hand, previous research shows that there are two types of delay-- the procedural delay and the correctional delay. And the service delay also can be divided into three stage-- pre-process delay, in-process delay and postprocess delay. On the basis of these previous researches, we explain that consumers with different regulatory focus will have different reaction( waiting intention and service evaluation) to service delay. On the empirical research part, the results show that the regulatory focus moderated the effect of service delay on consumers’ waiting intention. Compared with the prevention-focus consumers, promotion-focus consumers have higher waiting intention when face the procedural delay which occurs further away from the goal state of the service encounter. Whereas, compared with the promotion-focus consumers, prevention-focus consumers have higher waiting intention when face the correction delay which occurs close to the goal state of the service encounter. However, the results do not support the H2 b and H3 b, because the regulatory focus do not influence the consumers evaluation of the service after the delay. Finally, we provide suggestion for managers in order to help them understand the consumer behavior after service delay.