In Search of Negative Customer Feedback: The Effect of Expecting to Evaluate on Satisfaction Evaluations

Abstract

Customers' evaluations of quality and satisfaction are critical inputs in the development of marketing strategies. Given the increasingly common practice of asking for such evaluations, buyers of products (e.g., cars) and services (e.g., hotels, educational programs/courses) often know in advance that they subsequently will be asked to provide their evaluations. In a series of field and laboratory studies, the authors demonstrate that expecting to evaluate leads to less favorable quality and satisfaction evaluations and reduces customers' willingness to purchase and recommend the evaluated services. The negative bias of expected evaluations is observed when actual quality is either low or high, and it persists even when buyers are told explicitly to consider both the positive and negative aspects. The authors examine three possible explanations for this systematic bias, which are referred to as negativity enhancement, role expectation, and vigilant processing. The findings are most consistent with the negativity enhancement account, indicating that unless buyers begin the evaluation task with low expectations, they tend to focus during consumption primarily on negative aspects of product/service quality. The article concludes with a discussion of the theoretical and practical implications of this research.

Product quality vs service quality in the mobile industry: Is there a dominant driver of customer intention to switch providers?

“…Service quality is critical to service industries, such as the mobile telecommunication industry (Cronin and Taylor 1992;Ofir and Simonson 2001). The ability of a firm to understand and capitalize on how the customer evaluates service quality can directly contribute to a successful marketing strategy (Jain and Gupta 2004).…”

Connecting power with locus of control in marketing channel relationships: a response surface approach

“…First, the discrepancy between the effect of distributor power and the effect of supplier power resonates with the independence of positive and negative affects found in social psychology research (Diener & Emmons, 1985). Second, the asymmetric effects of powers on supplier control resonate with positivenegative asymmetry in evaluations found in social psychology literature (Kanouse, 1984;Peeters & Czapinski, 1990;Taylor, 1991) and recent marketing studies (Mittal & Kamakura, 2001;Mittal et al, 1998;Ofir & Simonson, 2001).…”

“…Social perception, attention in particular, is heavily influenced by the extent to which information is easily accessible. Therefore, we submit that a distributor treats its own power and partner firm's power as two distinctive, separate pieces of information and perceives as different the relationships between (1) distributor power and supplier control and (2) supplier power and supplier control (Kanouse, 1984;Mittal, Ross, & Baldasare, 1998;Ofir & Simonson, 2001;Peeters & Czapinski, 1990;Taylor, 1991).…”

Guidelines for Science: Evidence and Checklists

“…For example, non-experimental research suggests that pre-announced consumer satisfaction surveys improve consumers' satisfaction. In contrast, a series of well-designed experiments by Ofir and Simonson (2001) showed that such surveys harm customer satisfaction. In education, they harm satisfaction and reduce learning (Armstrong, 2012a).…”