Professional service providers must regularly give advice that best addresses their clients’ needs without knowing which course of action will ultimately work. Physicians, for example, face uncertainty in terms of the effectiveness of alternative treatment options. A better understanding of the extent to which clients want to be informed about such uncertainty would enable professional service providers to better address or manage their clients’ needs, expectations, and evaluations of both service encounters and outcomes.

To gain initial insights on how professional service providers can effectively communicate information with varying levels of certainty to clients, we first scraped the data of 27,563 lawyer-client interactions from a legal advice website. We assessed the frequency of lawyers’ expressions of certainty and tentativeness for each of these interactions using computerized text analysis with LIWC 2015. The results indicate that both lawyers’ expressions of certainty and tentativeness positively affect a client’s intention to recommend a lawyer. We develop a conceptual model that is rooted in signaling theory to better understand this surprising finding. Relying on two scenario-based experiments in the medical (N = 393) and finance (N = 365) sectors, we analyze how participants evaluate a doctor’s or a financial advisor’s (restrictive vs. moderate vs. open) uncertainty disclosure before and after the revelation of a (positive vs. minor negative vs. major negative) service outcome.

The results of our experimental studies indicate that an extensive (vs. restrictive) uncertainty disclosure has a negative effect on participants’ service encounter satisfaction in both contexts before they know the service outcome. A moderate (vs. restrictive) uncertainty disclosure, however, only lowers participants’ service encounter satisfaction in the medical but not in the financial context. Once the service outcome is known, an extensive (vs. restrictive) uncertainty disclosure has a significant positive effect on participants overall service satisfaction in the financial context but a significant negative effect in the medical context. Moreover, a moderate (vs. restrictive) uncertainty disclosure significantly lowers participants’ service satisfaction in the medical context but not in the financial context. In both contexts, participants service satisfaction decreases with less favorable service outcomes. However, adopting the level of uncertainty disclosure to the service outcome tends to positively affect participants’ satisfaction in the financial context.

We investigate the mediating role of participants’ performance expectations and evaluations as well as participants’ perceptions of the doctor’s/financial advisor’s morality to better understand these results. Amongst others and consistent with the evidence from the legal advice website, we find that higher levels of uncertainty disclosure do not per se negatively affect participants’ evaluations. In the finance context, uncertainty disclosure even tends to entail more favorable morality perceptions, which positively relate to participants’ service (encounter) satisfaction.

A major implication of our results is that professional service providers can actively influence client perceptions by adapting their level of uncertainty disclosure to major contingency factors (i.e., the service outcome and the service context). This is in line with the notion of signal fit and underscores the need for professional service providers to adopt a customer-oriented attitude during client interactions.

Since the onset of COVID-19, grocery shoppers have taken an online turn, shopping for groceries online more than before. Along with this surge in online grocery shopping, also came the surge in service failure situations such as product unavailability and delay in delivery. Service failure and retailers’ subsequent efforts of service recovery have been a topic of concern for both researchers and retailers. Researchers have established that service recovery post-service failure situations, provide retailers the opportunity to communicate their commitment towards the customers, resulting in increased customer satisfaction and repurchase intentions. However, it remains unclear, especially in the context of online grocery a) how do customer satisfaction with retailers’ recovery effort affect their overall satisfaction? b) what matters to customers, emotional or monetary compensation? In this study, we addressed these questions by examining the effects of compensation post-service delivery failure in scenario presenting apology (which we referred to as emotional compensation) and no-apology conditions. We employed a 2 (apology, no apology) x 5 compensation type (no monetary compensation, 25% off, 50% off, 75%, and 100% off from next delivery fees) experimental design. Online survey data (N=863) was collected from prolific, UK (N apology=432, N no-apology=431). We performed a series of independent t-tests to analyze if there was any difference in the post-recovery satisfaction (satisfaction with retailers’ recovery effort) and customers’ overall satisfaction (post-service failure and recovery) compensation types across and within the two conditions. Our findings indicated that post-recovery satisfaction (M emotional compensation = 3.96; Mno-apology=1.95, p<0.01) and overall satisfaction (M emotional compensation = 3.98; Mno-apology=3.01, p<0.01) was significantly higher when customers received no monetary but only emotional compensation. We also examined the effects of compensation type on recovery and overall satisfaction within apology and no apology conditions, to answer the abovementioned questions. We found that in both the conditions, there were no significant differences in the recovery and overall customer satisfaction when customers received 25%, 50 %, and 75% off their next delivery. On the contrary, in both apology and non-apology conditions, both recovery and overall customer satisfaction were significantly higher when customers were given full compensation. We also found that when customers were provided apology (emotional compensation), there was a smaller incremental effect on the post-recovery and overall satisfaction for these four compensation types, compared to the no-apology condition. Our findings not only offer theoretical implications in addressing the importance of emotional compensation on post-recovery and overall customer satisfaction but are of managerial relevance. Our results indicated that the incremental effect of monetary compensation on post-recovery and overall satisfaction is smaller than the effect of emotional compensation. Service failure and service failure recovery are pressing issues in the online grocery context and that monetary compensation marginally increases customers’ satisfaction with retailers’ recovery effort and their overall satisfaction with the retailer, which could be of strategic importance to online grocery retailers.

(References and results on request)

Introduction

Digital technologies have introduced new interfaces that have profoundly impacted the way in people socialize, shop, play, engage in mating/dating, communicate, and learn. Although digital technologies have resulted in many improvements to consumer welfare, such as fostering inexpensive and readily accessible modes of communication during a pandemic, many consumers have experienced negative outcomes from using these technologies, including Internet addiction, zoom-bombing, identity theft, and cyberstalking.

Consumers, organizations, and governmental agencies often realize and accept some risks associated with digital technologies as the benefits of these technologies counterbalance these risks. However, evidence also shows that these groups are unaware of and unprepared for the unintended, and often negative or perverse consequences that can emerge from commercial digital technologies. As a result, many consumers may find themselves experiencing vulnerability, referring to powerlessness (Parkinson et al., 2017), when using digital technologies, because most, if not all, consumers do not comprehend the negative outcomes that are associated with technology usage.

The purpose of this presentation is to propose a conceptual framework that specifies consumer, organizational, and governmental actions, or drivers, which result in digital service technologies negatively affecting consumer, communal, national, and/or global welfare.

Conceptual framework

The proposed COG (Consumer, Organization, Government) Framework of Unintended Digital Technology Service Failures posits that digital technologies often fail to meet their commercial intent due to reasons stemming from consumers (customers and users) or other individuals. Drivers comprising this first category include digital technologies failing due to negative social interaction, deliberate and accidental misuse, and negative health effects.

The second category considers that organizations often fail to keep their promises to their customers by failing to prevent or to address digital technology failures. Although consumers often readily provide organizations with their DNA, an organization’s legal responsibility concerning consumers’ DNA sample safety, storage, and retention remains unclear. This category includes data and security breaches; an inability to determine the accuracy of customer-provided data; issues pertaining to data storage, ownership, or sharing; and issues.

The third category pertains to the role of governmental institutions and agencies at local, state, national, and global levels, in purposefully limiting the market potential of commercial digital technologies, such as prohibiting their use in local, state, or national jurisdictions, or by using digital technologies to track and monitor citizens’ behaviors, which often results in restricting freedoms of verbal or sexual expression (Deibert, 2018).

Many governmental institutions and agencies curtail citizens’ freedoms in cyberspace for the objective of national security, with citizens belonging to minority and to marginalized groups being particularly at risk for becoming victims of human rights abuses when online (Pavlova, 2020).

Theoretical and societal implications
Service researchers have primarily perceived service organizations and providers as the main culprits in promoting service failures, with most service failures being controllable from a service firm’s point of view. Although this work highlights organizational culpability in promoting digital technology failures, it also reveals the extent to which other parties, such as individuals (i.e., non-users) and governmental agencies, contribute to service failures among digital technology users.

For decades, customer satisfaction has been regarded as the key means through which firms can manage their relationship with customers, and a pathway to desirable long-term outcomes, such as loyalty. A core assumption of this literature is that service providers must meet and indeed exceed customers' expectations to achieve said positive outcomes. In other words, service providers should do everything in their power to delight customers.

Rust and Oliver’s (2000; 86) seminal commentary on customer delight defines delight as “a profoundly positive emotional state generally resulting from having one's expectations exceeded to a surprising degree.” If exceeding customer expectation is a good thing, the ‘logical’ extension of this view would be that significantly exceeding customer expectation is not just desirable, but imperative for long-term success. Companies have taken note. For example, Mercedes-Benz has incorporated the concept of ‘delight’ into their corporate mission, and the seeming success of exceeding customers’ experience is apparent in their bottom-line (Michelli, 2015).

This prevailing view is subtly and indirectly undermined by a small and disjointed number of articles that gently question whether too much service is always a good idea (e.g. Dixon et al., 2010), or provide some empirical evidence suggesting that overgenerosity or attentiveness can be negatively interpreted by customers (e.g. Lui et al., 2019). Recent calls for research into whether customer delight might have negative side effects has further proposed that employees may experience emotional exhaustion or act against the best interest of the company (Barnes and Krallman, 2019). However, they do not question whether exceeding customers’ expectations will always result in delight.

The current study therefore focuses on exploring the extent to which ‘over’ (or in this sense), ‘excessive’ service provision may (or may not) lead to negative customer outcomes. In this regard, the focus of the research is to study which factors contribute (and to which degree) to customers’ interpretation of service provision as excessive, rather than meeting their expectations. An aligned objective is to examine conditions where significantly exceeding customers’ expectations is interpreted positively (such as Rust and Oliver’s ‘delighted’ consumers) or negatively (such as the disgruntled, overly-attentively served consumers of Kuo et al., 2013). Our study centres on a number of differing experiments designed to gauge how and why efforts by service providers to meet and exceed expectations can lead to consumer interpretations of excessive service provision (that which we label ‘over service’), to the point that negative outcomes accrue. The results of such studies strongly suggest that for some customers, in some contexts, over-service, far from eliciting delight may lead to disaster.

This research has implications for a wide range of scholars from those focused on studies of expectation-fulfilment, to studies of both positive and negative customer reactions to service (encompassing studies of unanticipated consumer reactions, such as consumer ‘misbehavior’, to researchers interested in consumers’ interpretations of service provision). We end our paper with a discussion of these and other contributions to these fields as well as an overview of implications for practice.