Diffusing Customer Anger in Service Recovery : A Conceptual Framework

Knowing how to handle angry customers following a service failure is an important aspect of a service provider’s work role. This paper presents a conceptual framework to help better understand: (1) how customer anger is provoked by a service failure; (2) how it may be reduced through specific service recovery attempts by service providers. Specifically, we propose a two phase conceptual model incorporating pre-service recovery (Phase 1) and service recovery (Phase 2). We argue that in Phase 1, an external cause produces anger and that cognitive appraisal in terms of: (a) goal relevance; (b) goal incongruence; and (c) ego-involvement moderates the intensity of anger experience by the customer. In Phase 2, we argue that customer anger can be reduced by the service provider doing the following: (a) listening; (b) blame displacement; and (c) apology