An Exploratory Research On Customer Silence Behavior During Service Failure

The intangibility、synchronicity and perishability of service determine service failure is unavoidable in service industry since its high interactivity.It’s common for consumers to keep silence while undergoing service failure.These silent consumers will choose never visit again and complain to their friends and relatives,resulting to the spread of negative word-of-mouth.They choose to complain to third-party organization. Companies will lose the opportunity to improve service quality and restore consumer satisfaction.This study focuses on behaviors consumers don’t complain to service companies directly while undergoing service failure.Referring to the existing literature and research about consumer complain behavior,this study choose three independent variables:attribution of service failure、perceived justice with service recovery and switching cost,and conduct 2 experiments which contain 8 groups.Our purpose is to explore how Attribution of Service Failure、Perceived Justice with Service Recovery and Switching Cost influence customers’silence behavior through two between-subjects experimental designs.The results indicate that:(1)Customers will choose acquiescent silence when they attribute service failure to themselves while others choose disregardful silence when they attribute service failure to companies.(2)High switching cost leads to acquiescent silence while low switching cost leads to disregardful silence.(3)When service failure is caused by companies, customers prefer acquiescent silence while switching cost is higher and disregardful silence while switching cost is lower.(4)Unprejudiced service recovery make customers choose acquiescent silence while others choose disregardful silence.(5)When service recovery is perceived unfair, customers prefer acquiescent silence while switching cost is higher and disregardful silence while switching cost is lower.The theoretical contributions of this research are as follows:firstly,we focus our target on customers who keep silence while suffering service failure, which is generally ignored by scholars.So this study is of innovation and pioneer. Secondly,we transplant employee silence in Organizational Behavior to Consumer Behavior and put forward a concept called consumer silence.We further give it definite definition and measurement dimensions,which lay a foundation for following researches.Thirdly,we set up a preliminary analysis framework which,which further and extend the research on Consumer Behavior under service failure situations.