Affective consumer responses in service encounters: The emotional content in narratives of critical incidents

This research explores the effect of emotion on satisfaction with after sal es services. Emotional content is derived from the respondent's answers to the so-called critical incident question in order to classify the informati on according to established categories and the object responsible for evoki ng the emotional response. The emotional content is classified according to three levels of inclusiveness; the superordinate, the basic and the subord inate level. We found that the subordinate level is responsible for explain ing most of the service satisfaction. Positive emotions like positive surpr ise, pleasure and contentment contribute positively to satisfaction, while negative emotions, such as irritation and disappointment have a negative in fluence. Furthermore, more intense emotions have a greater impact on custom er satisfaction than less intense emotions. Irritation, especially, has an extraordinarily negative impact on customer satisfaction. The positive emot ion categories contribute almost equally to satisfaction. While the service employee is mostly the object of positive emotions in the critical inciden ts, the product, albeit less often the object of emotion, mostly evokes neg ative emotions. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.