The Temporal Construal of Customer Satisfaction
通过三项研究(两个实验和一个实地研究)发现,服务消费经历与评价之间的时间间隔会影响满意度判断,消费者对近期经历依赖具体属性,对远期经历依赖抽象属性,建议管理者采用纵向测量方法。
Traditional customer satisfaction research considers satisfaction judgments invariant to temporal distance. We conduct two experiments and a field study to show that the amount of time elapsed between a service consumption experience and its evaluation influences satisfaction judgments. We show that consumers rely on concrete attributes to represent near-past (NP) experiences and on abstract attributes to represent distant-past (DP) experiences (i.e., different construal levels). The findings indicate that construal mechanisms generate intertemporal shifts in the importance of the attributes driving satisfaction over time (Study 1), in the weights assigned to abstract and concrete attributes of a past service experience (Study 2), and in overall satisfaction judgments when abstract and concrete attributes perform differently (Study 3). Overall, the results provide support for the idea that satisfaction judgments shift over time as a result of the different psychological mechanisms that are activated as a function of the time elapsing between the service experience and its evaluation. Managers are advised to adopt longitudinal approaches to customer satisfaction measurement: An immediate assessment to capture customers’ evaluations of the performance of the concrete details of the experience and a delayed assessment to measure customer satisfaction with more abstract and goal-related features of the experience.