How Angry Customer Complaints Influence Salesperson Commitment to Service Quality

Abstract

The conventional advice for salespeople facing angry customer complaints is to remain calm and provide high-quality service. Yet salespeople’s willingness and ability to do so depends on whether they believe the customer is justified in complaining with an angry tone. Using an experimental design with salespeople as participants, this study shows that salespeople experience greater anger when they blame someone other than themselves for causing the service failure. Furthermore, when customers complain in an angry tone and salespeople believe others are responsible for the service failure, salespeople feel greater anger, perceive more emotional labor, develop stronger revenge intentions, and express less commitment to serving customers. Although organizations sometimes consider customer complaints beneficial, the current study shows that when customers complain in an angry tone, salespeople often feel like providing poorer service, both to that customer and to others.