Exposure to Structured Service Environments as a Proactive Strategy for Handling Service Failures
研究通过实地和实验室实验发现，结构化服务环境能通过提升可预测性感知，减少顾客对服务失败的负面反应，并识别了该策略失效的边界条件。
This research investigates how structured service environments can mitigate negative customer responses to service failures. We propose a proactive strategy that aims to preemptively manage customer expectations. Drawing on the meaning maintenance model, we theorize and find that heightened perceptions of predictability inherent in structured environments reduce customers’ need to make sense of discrepancies between actual and expected outcomes. In turn, customers are less likely to blame the firm and more likely to repurchase from it. Our research includes a field experiment and three online and lab experiments across various contexts. We identify key boundary conditions: structured environments are less effective when failures appear predictable due to recurring causes (stability attribution) or when the firm could have prevented them (controllability attribution). Furthermore, if the firm is merely associated with the failure but not directly involved, the mitigating effect of structured environments does also not occur. These insights offer managers a novel proactive strategy to buffer customer responses to service failures.