Abstract
Customers give and receive help from others during service encounters, which is called intercustomer helping. Inter-customer helping is a form of customer-to-customer interactions (CCI). CCIs are more common in the current economy where more customers deliver services on their own, without involvement of service workers through self-service technologies, and therefore, it is critical to understand CCI. However, there have been only limited efforts to understand interactions between customers, and more emphasis was on understanding the interactions between employees and customers. Thus, the current research fills this gap through investigating the effect of receiving help from another customer (vs. no help) on customer satisfaction during service failures. In particular, the current research suggests that receiving inter-customer helping (vs. receiving no help) would increase customer satisfaction through mitigating disappointment.
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Seo Young Kim is a Ph.D in Marketing at Seoul National University. She also holds a Master’s degree in Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University, and a Bachelor's degree in Economics at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Her research interests include areas such as services marketing, customer helping behavior and consumer behavior.
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Kim, S.Y. Inter-customer helping during service failures: The mediating role of disappointment. J Serv Sci Res 9, 61–71 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12927-017-0004-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12927-017-0004-4