Proactive Service Recoveries – How Forewarning Helps to Reduce Two Forms of Negative Word-of-mouth

While managerial knowledge about consumers’ reactions to recovery efforts following service failures is quite profound, insights about the effects of proactive endeavors for service failure prevention is surprisingly limited. This research compares a pre-failure recovery activity (i.e., forewarning) with two no pre-information failure scenarios (i.e., company-caused failure, circumstances-caused failure) and shows that the former induces customer guilt, while the latter anger. It is demonstrated that these two emotions mediate the failure conditions’ effects on two different forms of electronic negative word-of-mouth (NWOM). That is, revenge-based NWOM (i.e., intention to harm the involved company with unfavorable comments) and support-giving NWOM (i.e., intention to inform fellow consumers about the negative experience). Findings from a scenario-based online experiment suggest that anger triggers both NWOM types simultaneously, while guilt can reduce the motivation to voice support-giving NWOM. However, perceived guilt is incapable of extenuating vengeful NWOM.