Anticipated firm interaction can bias expressed customer satisfaction

Ashesh Mukherjee, Thomas Burnham and Dan King

Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 2021, vol. 59, issue C

Abstract: Customers sometimes anticipate interacting with firms after completing satisfaction surveys to discuss their survey responses. The purpose of this research is to investigate the potential effect of anticipated firm interaction on expressed satisfaction in surveys. Results of four studies show that anticipated firm interaction can bias expressed satisfaction in surveys, such that expressed satisfaction is a less accurate measure of actual satisfaction when anticipated firm interaction is present. Results also indicate that the bias is driven by a psychological mechanism of conflict avoidance, and the bias is eliminated when customers have extremely low levels of actual satisfaction. These results contribute theoretically to the literature by identifying a new survey-related bias in satisfaction measurement, identifying the underlying mechanism of the bias, and specifying a boundary condition within which the bias operates.

Keywords: Buyer behavior; Customer satisfaction; Anticipated firm interaction; Conflict avoidance; Survey bias (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0969698920313874
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:joreco:v:59:y:2021:i:c:s0969698920313874

DOI: 10.1016/j.jretconser.2020.102379

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services is currently edited by Harry Timmermans

More articles in Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().