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Fatal errors: unbridling emotions inservice failure experiencesStephanie O'Donohoe a & Darach Turley ba Management School and Economics , The University ofEdinburgh , 50 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9JY, UKb Business School , Dublin City University , Glasnevin Dublin 9,IrelandPublished online: 28 Feb 2007.

To cite this article: Stephanie O'Donohoe & Darach Turley (2007) Fatal errors: unbridlingemotions in service failure experiences, Journal of Strategic Marketing, 15:1, 17-28, DOI:10.1080/09652540601088641

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Fatal errors: unbridling emotions in servicefailure experiences

STEPHANIE O’DONOHOE*

Management School and Economics, The University of Edinburgh, 50 George Square,

Edinburgh EH8 9JY, UK

DARACH TURLEY

Business School, Dublin City University, Glasnevin Dublin 9, Ireland

INTRODUCTION

The advantage of emotions is that they lead us astray; the advantage of Science is that it is not

emotional. (Oscar Wilde (1891) [1908] The Picture of Dorian Cray, Paris: Charles Carrington, p. 59)

There is little chance of researchers steeped in the Saxon tradition being led astray by the ‘…often

private, disguised, inchoate, non-conscious, non-rational and multidimensional characteristics

ascribed to, and experienced in, emotion’ (Sturdy, 2003, p. 99). Although emotions may be

uncomfortable territory for the Saxon researcher, they constitute a natural habitat for Celts, who

are ‘undisciplinable, anarchical, and turbulent by nature’ (Arnold, 1891, p. 91).

This paper explores emotional dimensions of service failure experiences. In keeping with the

Celtic spirit, its origins have more to do with coincidence than calculation; unsolicited comments

from interviews with service providers dealing with bereaved consumers led us to explore service

failure in a context that was already highly charged. Reviewing studies on these issues, we were

shocked by how methodologically circumscribed, emotionally sterile, and essentially trivial much

research in this area appeared to be. According to this literature, for example, the most serious

service breakdowns involve consumers finding no record of their reservation at a hotel (Levesque

and McDougall, 2000), receiving incorrect items by mail order or getting the wrong room key in

a hotel (Palmer, Beggs and Keown-McMullan, 2000). Undoubtedly such incidents are annoying,

but the marketing literature appears silent on a whole range of service encounters that are difficult

and distressing even before a service breakdown occurs. It also appears to have neglected what

might be termed ‘fatal errors’—critical, irreversible mistakes that affect us as ‘people first and

consumers second’ (Schneider and Bowen, 1999), such as a cancelled flight preventing us from

attending a funeral.

In the following sections, we review literature on emotions in services and on service failure

and recovery. We then present a study examining the experiences of frontline staff who deal with

* Corresponding author: Phone: +44 (0)131 650 3821/6; Email: s.odonohoe@ed.ac.uk

JOURNAL OF STRATEGIC MARKETING 15 17–28 (FEBRUARY 2007)

Journal of Strategic Marketing ISSN 0965–254X print/ISSN 1466–4488 online # 2007 Taylor & Francishttp://www.tandf.co.uk/journals

DOI: 10.1080/09652540601088641

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distraught consumers following a service failure, and we consider the implications of our findings

for marketing theory, research and practice.

EMOTIONS, MARKETING AND SERVICES

Cast as demonic, mystical and unknowable creatures, emotions were banished in the age of reason

to the margins of scholarly enquiry, and are still often reduced to ‘abstract, individualized and

pathological categories which are often alien to subjective experience and social action’ (Sturdy,

2003, p. 84). This analysis, grounded in organizational studies, seems equally applicable to

research in marketing. Although there is growing recognition of consumption experiences as

‘emotion-drenched’ (O’Shaughnessy and O’Shaughnessy, 2003), and often intensely so (Elliott,

1998), the actual range and depth of emotions experienced are not reflected in the literature

(Brown and Reid, 1997). Even when emotions are admitted to the research arena, they rarely

roam free. Instead, they have been captured by researchers who reduce the animated to the

amenable without even recognising what has been lost in the process. For example, Mudie,

Cottam and Raeside (2003, p. 85) observe with approval that:

Although emotions and feelings are often considered the most idiosyncratic of psychological

phenomena, a coherent body of theory and data has emerged, including a set of laws for describing the

phenomenon…

Research instruments used to tame emotions in marketing include the Emotions Profile Index

(Plutchik and Kellerman, 1974), the Differential Emotions Scale (Izard, 1977), the Consumption

Emotion Set (Richins, 1997) and the PAD scale (Mehrabian and Russell, 1974). The last of these

is an interesting case of the Saxon logic applied to emotions, since it is most effective ‘…when the

researcher…does not need to know the specific emotions being experienced by study

participants’ (Richins, 1997, p. 128).

Emotional dimensions of service employees’ work have received increasing attention within

organizational studies (Hochschild, 1983; Rafaeli and Sutton, 1987; Fineman, 1993, 2000).

Marketing research addressing emotional dimensions of service encounters, however, has been

limited in scope and substance (Price, Arnould and Tierney, 1995b), sometimes focusing on

single, unidimensional measures such as ‘satisfaction’, which is one of many emotions (Soderlund,

2003). Other studies have examined the ability of various emotions to predict satisfaction or

future intentions (Dube and Morgan, 1998; Van Dolan et al., 2001).

One innovative study of service encounters (Price, Arnould and Deibler, 1995a) involved

participant observation and consumer diaries by graduate marketing students. Their emotional

responses were more intense ‘for services that last longer and take place in more intimate

proximate space’ (ibid., p. 35). Positive emotional responses were influenced by whether staff met

minimum standards of civility, showed extra attention and mutual understanding, and were

considered authentic and competent. Negative emotional responses were most influenced by

failure to meet minimum standards of civility. However, ‘[o]n average, consumers have little or

no emotional response (either positive or negative) to service encounters’ (Price et al., 1995a,

p. 49). This is hardly surprising since the examples cited are drawn from encounters with staff such

as shop assistants, waiters and car mechanics.

In contrast to such pedestrian services, Price et al. (1995b; Arnould and Price, 1993) explored

white water river-rafting as an extended, affectively charged and intimate service encounter

between river guides and their clients. Overall client perceptions were influenced by extras (staff

surpassing what customers could reasonably expect from a commercial transaction) and authentic

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understanding, which occurred ‘when the provider’s performance connects with the client’s life

experiences and both engage in self-disclosure’ (Price et al., 1995b, p. 93). This highlights the

significant ‘emotional labour’ (Hochschild, 1983) involved when staff engage their ‘emotions,

sense of drama, and skills…’ (Price et al., 1995b, p. 87).

The prevailing positivistic paradigm in marketing emphasises ‘neutrality, objectivity,

disinterestedness and emotionlessness’ (Brown and Reid, 1997, p. 83). This may explain why

many researchers seem to have been so afraid of encountering the emotional beast they claimed to

hunt that they looked in places least likely to harbour it, through lenses least likely to reflect its

power. Most marketing accounts of emotions during service encounters are drawn from surveys

or experiments addressing low-level emotions in mundane situations, with considerable emphasis

given to satisfaction as a dependent variable. As Soderlund (2003) observes, satisfaction is a

pleasant, low arousal condition. Dissatisfaction, however, is more than the absence of satisfaction;

it is rather an example of an unpleasant, high arousal condition—as are anger, fear, frustration and

distress, which may also feature in service encounters. Furthermore, the rationality of the

satisfaction paradigm denies ‘the emotionality—even irrationality—of delight and outrage’ which

customers may experience (Schneider and Bowen, 1999: 37). Such emotionality is paramount in

instances of customer rage, which Grove, Fisk and John (2004, p. 42) argue are increasing,

particularly in the service sector. Such rage tends to be disproportionate to the event triggering it,

and ranges from ‘verbal indignation, to vandalism, to physical injury, and even death’. Indeed,

Brown and Reid (1997) discuss a fatal ‘trolley rage’ incident, noting that ‘cutting-edge consumer

researchers’ were slow to recognize the potential for such fury. Heightened customer

dissatisfaction, frustration or hostility is likely to infuse ensuing recovery attempts with an

emotional charge adding to the challenge for service staff. It is to this area we now turn.

SERVICE FAILURE AND RECOVERY

Our greatest glory is not in never falling,

but in rising every time we fall. (Oliver Goldsmith)

Goldsmith’s sentiments are echoed in the contemporary literature on service failure and recovery.

Although many organizations develop service blueprints (Shostack, 1984) to standardize

procedures and prevent problems arising, the emphasis in services marketing has shifted from

‘zero defects’ to ‘zero defections’ (Reichfield and Sasser, 1990). Indeed, ‘some research suggests

that when a business makes amends, or recovers, a remarkable kind of customer loyalty may

result’ (Schneider and Bowen, 1999, p. 41).

Although this ‘recovery paradox’ has been challenged (McCullough, Berry and Yadav, 2000;

Weun, Beatty and Jones, 2004), many studies have linked service recovery and satisfaction, and

prescriptions for effective recovery tactics abound. These include anticipating, inviting and

listening to complaints; establishing recovery standards, guidelines and tracking systems;

responding quickly to problems; and informing customers of developments. Furthermore, since

frontline staff are responsible for implementing these strategies, service recovery should be

addressed in recruitment and training, with staff motivated and empowered to meet customer

needs (Hart, Heskett and Sasser, 2000; Brown, 2000).

Although Ringberg and Christensen (2003) identify other perspectives on restoring balance,

issues of fairness, equity or justice reverberate throughout this literature (Woodruff, Cadotte and

Jenkins, 1983; Wirtz and Mattila, 2004). Three dimensions of justice—distributive, procedural

SERVICE FAILURE EXPERIENCES 19

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and interactional—have been identified (Tax and Brown, 1998). Distributive justice is outcome-

related, and includes apologies, refunds, replacements and discounts to make restitution to

consumers for service failure (Tax, Brown and Chandrashekaran, 1998). Procedural justice refers to

the fairness of rules and procedures determining such outcomes, including the speed and

flexibility of staff response, their willingness to take responsibility for problems, and opportunities

for customers to voice concerns and influence outcomes (Tax and Brown, 1998; Boshoff and

Leong, 1998; Sparks and McColl-Kennedy, 2001). Finally, interactional justice concerns how staff

relate personally to customers, including politeness, empathy, honesty, effort, expressions of

concern and explanations concerning the service failure.

Several important themes emerge from this review of service emotions, failure and recovery in

the marketing literature. It is clear that these are complex phenomena that vary considerably from

one context to the next. It is also clear that the immediate reaction of staff to service failure is

crucial in shaping customer experiences. It is striking, however, to see the extent to which ‘the

steady humdrum habit of the creeping Saxon’ (Arnold, 1891, p. 92) has colonised such potentially

turbulent territory. These areas of human experience appear to have been drained of their

vibrance and volatility by the conceptual confines of satisfaction and the methodological

monotheism of positivism. This leaves us knowing little and understanding less, for example,

about the emotions and experiences of service providers faced with difficult and highly charged

situations, especially after mistakes occur. In this context, Hoch, Schembri and Sandberg (2003)

call for research that allows staff to ‘provide a holistic description of their lived experience of

service recovery’, and treats the employee as ‘…a reflective being whose understanding allows for

improvisation and adjustment to various situations instead of merely following prescriptive

behaviours’ (ibid., p. 21).

THE CURRENT STUDY

This paper examines the understandings, emotions and practices of staff in response to service

failure, in a setting which is often emotionally charged from the outset. The service in question

takes place when bereaved relatives visit or telephone Irish newspaper offices to insert an In

Memoriam notice, usually on the anniversary of a death. In Memoriams (IMs) are a form of classified

advertising, paid for by the word or line. They include the name of the deceased, the number of

years that have passed since the death, and details of those who have inserted the notice. Some

include a photograph, but most contain a verse in which those left behind express their sadness

and affirm the continuing importance of the deceased in their lives. For example:

O’BRIEN Anne—First anniversary

It was a sudden parting

Too bitter to forget

Only those who loved you

Are the ones who will never forget

—Sadly missed by her two sisters Mary and Susan

and her nieces and nephews

This paper is drawn from a broader multi-method study of Irish IMs. It focuses on depth

interviews with ten newspaper employees responsible for taking in these notices in person at the

office counter or by telephone. Our sample of newspapers was spread around Ireland, ranging

from those serving a very small area to those with national coverage. All the newspaper staff

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interviewed were women, but they varied in age from early 20s to late 40s. Their experience of

IM work ranged from 18 months to over 20 years.

Our initial reason for seeking an employee perspective was to complement interviews we had

undertaken with bereaved consumers by obtaining an overview of the process of placing IMs.

The staff interviews lasted between 60 and 90 minutes, and began by asking what happened when

people came to the office or telephoned to insert an IM. Discussion broadened from there, usually

encompassing staff views about the kind of people who placed the notices, their motivations and

emotions, and particular incidents which were memorable for some reason. After the first few

interviews, it became clear that placing such a notice could be a highly charged service encounter,

demanding for staff as well as consumers, and that this merited attention in its own right. One

particularly striking aspect of the interviews was that all the staff we spoke to raised the subject of

mistakes without any prompting from us. Analysing the transcripts, we questioned why this was

such an important issue for them, and our attempt to answer this question led us to the literature

reviewed above. Whilst our informants acknowledged that many IM service encounters were

relatively routine and perfunctory, those involving complaints were definitely not. Staff

experiences of this latter group form the central focus of this paper.

FINDINGS

All newspaper employees acknowledged that despite earnest endeavours to prevent errors, ‘zero

defects’ was an unreachable if worthy goal—their own fallibility and that of their customers

would frustrate their best intentions to deliver a flawless service. Every informant had experience

of encounters with aggrieved customers who had discovered an error in the published IM

following an earlier encounter in which they had created and paid for the notice; this in turn

could have been preceded by numerous transactions over the years on previous anniversaries. A

doubly charged emotional undercurrent permeated these stressful service encounters; staff

appreciated that clients’ personal grief for the deceased compounded their reaction to the

perceived failure by the newspaper.

Aggrieved placers were variously portrayed as being ‘extremely upset’, ‘annoyed’, ‘very

sensitive’, ‘highly indignant’, ‘absolutely raging’, ‘disappointed’, ‘distressed’ and ‘crying’.

Understandably, the most memorable recovery attempts in employees’ minds often featured

irate customers who would ‘tear strips off you’, ‘like vicious, you know’. Even in such cases, there

was no insinuation of emotional dissemblance on the part of placers by informants and certainly

no sense of them being seen as ‘jaycustomers’ (Lovelock, 1994, in Harris and Reynolds, 2004)

approaching the newspaper office on spurious, contrived or frivolous pretexts. Newspaper staff

appreciated that these customer grievances were as real as the emotions to which they gave rise.

Service failure

If failures were inevitable, they were also inevitably critical. Whilst the typical mistake might

appear petty and insignificant—an incorrect spelling, word or date, or photo—what exercised

aggrieved customers most was the interpretation or meanings parties outside the service dyad

would infer from the error in question. The core element of the IM service, the printed verse, is a

publicly enacted and socially embedded ritual process. If an incomplete or incorrect verse was out

there in the public arena in cold print, as with the photographer who fails to materialize on the

wedding day, there was little that could be done to repair the perceived hurt done to placers and

their public standing. In this sense, ‘service recovery’ may be a misnomer here. It is quite likely

SERVICE FAILURE EXPERIENCES 21

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that much of the seriousness attached to IM failure stems from frustration at its inherent

irreversibility.

Emotional labour

Our Irish blunders are never blunders of the heart. (Maria Edgeworth, 1808, p. 72)

The Edgeworth’s observation certainly seems to apply to the newspaper staff interviewed in

this study. Whilst Hochschild (1983) presents emotional labour primarily as the display and

suppression of feelings, in this case the emotions invested in and infusing labour seemed

paramount. Although adversarial and hostile confrontations were relatively infrequent, the

prospect of them appeared to underpin and nurture a generalized anxiety. Indeed, several staff

mentioned feelings of fear and foreboding as the newspaper hit the stands:

You have this kind of thing, you know that Wednesday morning for instance the paper is published

and you think, ‘Oh my God!’, you know. Wednesday morning is definitely a negative morning

because if you go to answer the phone you think, ‘Oh no, what’s wrong?’. [Maura]

Encounters with aggrieved customers were ‘dreaded’, and referred to as one of their ‘biggest

fears’. Indeed, there was a visceral quality to anticipating them:

But the worst thing was when somebody rang you up to complain about it and like your stomach

flipped: ‘I don’t want to have this conversation! Oh God [in trembling voice]!’. You’d nearly pay the

person beside you to handle it…these mistakes come back to haunt you. [Lorraine]

Interestingly, feelings of fears and dread were discussed purely in terms of immediate customer

reactions, rather than concerns about being upbraided by line managers. It was also striking that

although they hated being at the receiving end of customer tirades, staff did not challenge, or even

seem to resent such behaviour. Profuse and sincere apologies were the order of the day, even

when they did not feel they were to blame. For example, Lorraine had spent a great deal of time

on the telephone with a woman who wanted a notice printed in the Irish language:

In the end there was just like a few spelling mistakes and I myself had gone to the ends of the earth to

try and get everything perfect and that kind of thing…. And she rang me up the next day and like my

heart nearly stopped. And I was just like, ‘Oh my God!’ and I had to just apologise to her. I knew I was

in the right, but just don’t even bother! [Lorraine]

An ethic of helping sad or distressed customers pervaded their accounts of their work in general,

and they hated adding to, rather than ameliorating their customers’ grief. Empathy, defined as ‘the

inner experience of sharing in and comprehending the momentary psychological state of another

person’ (Schafer, 1959, in Marandi and Ranchhod, 2003, p. 3), permeated informant accounts of

customer distress at service failure. Even descriptions of customer anger were accompanied by

comments like ‘they’ve every right to do so’ and ‘you just put yourself in their position’. One

employee talked about how service failures exacerbated the loss of control experienced in

bereavement:

I suppose you can understand it because this person has died and now everything is falling apart,

nothing is going right, you know that kind of way…. [Maura]

This ability to ‘take the role of the other’ (Mead, 1934) differs from the ‘authentic understanding’

discussed by Price et al. (1995b, p. 93), in that there was a connection with the customer’s life

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experience but no self-disclosure on the part of the newspaper staff, even if they had been

bereaved themselves. In such cases, staff preferred to draw on their own experience without

drawing attention to it; as one employee put it, ‘I’m there to sort of more or less of help people at

the counter, not to help myself’.

Staff empathy extended to the social implications of mistakes in published IM notices, not least

because they themselves were typically members of the same community that would read and

scrutinize the verses:

But it is very important that they are done properly, even times when there is only one word out of

place then people can get extremely upset and emotional because they’ll say, ‘Now look at this you’ve

made a mess of this now and what are people going to think?’. Yeah, it’s very important how other

people are going to think how the thing is presented. It’s extremely important because it’s a very

sensitive time…people would see this as how the family are honouring the person. [Mona]

As Hoch et al. (2003) have argued, there is a need to explore the meanings and understandings as

well as the actions of staff attempting service recovery. In this case, it seemed that the dread of

facing ‘raging’ or ‘inconsolable’ customers, coupled with the empathy they felt for them, drove

not only their response to service failure but also their work regarding service blueprinting. A real

sense of ownership and investment was evident as staff discussed the newspapers’ policies

regarding checking the notices:

So they’re proofread a couple of times, and not even just by the proofreaders but by the girls outside in

the front office as well, because if something goes in incorrect, it causes a lot of distress for the people

concerned. [Janet]

Service provider response

Given the finely demarcated circulation territories of regional Irish newspapers, exit rather than

switching is the sole avenue open to disaffected placers. There is literally no other show in town.

Despite this, there was not a scintilla of monopolistic hubris evident in any interviews.

I mean, how could you say to somebody, ‘Tough, your In Memoriam didn’t go in the paper?’. You

can’t be like that with people particularly in that situation. [Maeve]

Once an error had been identified and a complaint made, staff did not debate who was to blame

or challenge disproportionate customer responses to mistakes. ‘Taking it on the chin’ (Boshoff

and Leong, 1998) was the favoured reaction. Indeed, customer distress was such that any

protracted post-mortem on who was at fault seemed both insensitive and counterproductive.

These distraught placers sought a listener, not logic or argumentation. In fact, aggrieved placers

did not seem to possess any plan of action, any list of demands on returning to the newspaper

office. Rather, returning to the office to tell their story was the plan. There was no hint of their

wanting to report front-line staff to superiors or to appraise management of their situation. Their

overriding concern was to have the harm they had suffered acknowledged empathetically.

Staff responses to service failure often resonated with the justice dimensions identified by Tax

and Brown (1998). Instances of distributive justice were common, although restitution was

inevitably more symbolic than substantial. An apology is a form of psychological equity (Tax et al.,

1998), and a ‘crucial first step in restoring balance after a service failure’ (Boshoff and Leong,

1998, p. 27). In the case of IM service failures, frontline staff seemed to understand this acutely

and intuitively; they knew that any proposed offer of redress had to be prefaced by a fulsome

SERVICE FAILURE EXPERIENCES 23

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apology and acknowledgement that no compensation or remedy could do justice to what had

occurred.

Basically you ring and you crawl…and you offer them the money back and you say you’ll put it in next

week and we’ll put it in bigger next week and we’ll put photographs in for free and then people

generally then calm down. [Pat]

Several additional distributive remedies were proposed by newspaper employees, such as credit

for next year’s notice or deferral of the verse to the deceased person’s next birthday. However,

both were proposed on the clear mutual understanding that ‘it would not be the same thing’.

Two further options were fraught with drawbacks, underscoring how curtailed and constrained

distributive possibilities could be. Offering a discount smacked of marketplace haggling and risked

introducing an element of commercial profanity into an essentially sacred matter.

It wasn’t the kind of area where people would have appreciated a discount. Like that was bad taste you

know. With any other kind of ad that would be the logical thing to do but it was just kind of, ‘We are

dreadfully sorry’ and you know, maybe if they got really upset we might write them a letter. [Lorraine]

Similarly, the seemingly simple expedient of running the corrected verse the following week

could run foul of the same exacting communal scrutiny that had transformed a mistaken printing

detail into a public embarrassment in the first place.

But with a commercial thing or whatever you can say to them, ‘Look we will try to do it next week or

we’ll try and sort it out’. With a commercial thing you can work it out but with something like this if

an acknowledgement goes in twice it looks ridiculous, do you know what I mean?…. Because the

neighbours are more likely to say, ‘What in the name of God are they putting that in twice for?’. It

then more highlights the mistake than cures the problem. [Maura]

Procedural justice seems to have been well served in all newspaper offices. Responsibility was

immediately and unreservedly accepted by staff, and the ensuing recovery process was invariably

flexible and prompt. Complainants were afforded options, choice of outcomes, there and then.

There were no cases of aggrieved customers being ‘palmed off’ onto other employees or staff

needing to contact a supervisor before offering some form of restitution. Indeed, Tax and

Brown’s (1998, p. 78) injunction: ‘whichever employee receives a complaint, owns the

complaint’ was much in evidence.

The interactional style reported by the newspaper employees was sincere. When they reported

that they tried to be ‘as sympathetic as possible and apologize as profusely as possible’ and that ‘you

basically ring up and you crawl’, they meant it without any reservation or dissemblance.

Recovery attempts were shot through with genuine concern and effort, dictated more by human

empathy than by commercial good practice or any desire for professional advancement.

In general, these frontline employees could not be faulted for the seriousness or sensitivity with

which they approached cases of service failure. Whilst this could be presented within the

ideological parameters of customer sovereignty, to do so would obscure a fundamental issue.

Responding as they did was ‘a human thing’ for them, arising from socially embedded

interactions rather than marketing prescriptions; in other words they saw themselves as dealing

with customers on a person-to-person rather than employee-customer basis (Korczynski, 2002).

The overall impression gleaned from employees’ accounts of recovery attempts is of an

empowered, contextually mediated, and carefully improvised emotional response. There was

neither advocacy of nor reference to any prescribed behavioural sequence, any normative

recovery blueprint (Shostack, 1984; Tax and Brown, 1998). Recovery in these women’s eyes had

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to be thoroughly contextual, resonating with doubts expressed by Palmer et al. (2000, p. 524) that

any blueprint can ‘systematically prescribe recovery processes which are actionable by front line

employees’.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS

Objectively, emotions matter because many forms of human behavior would be unintelligible if we did

not see them through the prism of emotion. (Elster, in O’Shaughnessy and O’Shaughnessy, 2003, p. 4)

The prism of emotion, and a Celtic research perspective, offer a fresh vision of service failure and

recovery encompassing dimensions of experience invisible or irrelevant through the Saxon lens.

Clearly, there is much work to be done to illuminate rather than enumerate the emotions of

consumers and staff participating in service encounters, particularly when things go wrong in

situations that are highly charged to begin with. This study sought to understand the experiences

of a group of service employees required to engage with and assuage bereaved clients following a

service breakdown. Put in mainstream market-speak, they deal with dissatisfied customers. If

nothing else, the findings highlight the inherent impoverishment and inability of the term

‘dissatisfaction’ to do justice to the breadth and depth of the emotional tableau evinced by such

failures. Equally, they underscore how the expression ‘dealing with dissatisfied customers’ can be

glibly reeled off and reduced to aseptic, emotionally uninvolving, prescriptive blueprints that

downgrade and debase the emotional labour of frontline staff. In this case, it may be no

coincidence that all the staff we encountered were female; emotional labour is often seen as the

preserve of women and discounted on that basis (Hochschild, 1983).

While the service in question may seem localized and culture-specific, it nonetheless advances

extant literature by illustrating how the irreversibility of a critical service failure—a fatal error—

places an additional emotional and practical overlay on service encounters. In such cases, the

repertoire of distributive outcomes is severely curtailed and any redress will likely be inadequate.

This in turn makes symbolic restitution paramount. Indeed, it may be that failed attempts

at service recovery in situations like these have more to do with failures of feeling than of

processes.

The case of IMs is also a telling example of a monopoly. There has been a deathly silence in the

recovery literature on how monopolies constitute a distinctive servicescape for both client and

provider. Typically, studies have focused exclusively on competitive markets where freedom to

defect is both commonplace and constitutive. This research has shown how placers have a

‘hostage relationship’ (Colwell and Hogarth-Scott, 2004) with their local newspaper, how

switching is not an option and yet, despite this, staff can comport themselves in such a way that

clients’ right to complain is never minimized or questioned.

Portrayal of the frontline newspaper staff has been uniformly positive in this study. It might

well be asked whether we have stumbled upon some rare sub-species of sanctified service

providers, paragons of patience, candidates for canonization, proffering accounts of complaint

handling devoid of any self-serving subtext. Several points are worth noting in this respect. These

interviews were undertaken initially to progress our understanding of the IM placement process;

we did not intend to probe into the performance of newspaper employees themselves as service

providers. All instances of breakdown and subsequent recovery attempts were volunteered,

unprompted, by the staff themselves, and did not form part of the researchers’ agenda. It should

also be noted that this paper focuses on encounters following a service breakdown, rather than the

initial placing of the IM verse. Although staff were generally respectful and empathetic in dealing

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with bereaved customers, many accounts of these initial encounters incorporated staff throwing

eyes to heaven, with quarrelsome and quirky placers fuelling backstage mimicry and storytelling.

Such instances serve to dispel any notion that our respondents were a group of superhuman

service practitioners devoid of fallible human reflexes.

When mistakes occurred, however, staff rose to the occasion in both practical and emotional

terms. The overriding impression gleaned from speaking with these informants was of a group of

women who were responding and reacting to some fundamental emotional exigence with

distraught fellow humans. This response level went deeper than the dictates of any standardized

customer orientation, and its trajectory was dictated more by intuitive insight into the

contextual emotional state of placers than by any template for service recovery. This is a

salutary reminder that marketing, particularly as it is practiced by frontline service providers, is a

human, social process. W.B. Yeats once asked how we can tell the dancer from the dance.

Research that isolates service providers, their experiences and emotions from the practice of

service recovery distorts and demeans the lived experience of marketing, and that in itself

constitutes a fatal error.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to thank the reviewers for constructive comments and Kathryn Waite for

suggesting useful literature on service failure and recovery at the outset.

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