| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立中興大學 === 行銷學系所 === 98 === While there is some evidences that customer-to-customer interaction has a negative impact on customer satisfaction with the firm (e.g. Bitner et al., 1994; Grove and Fisk, 1997; Harris and Reynolds, 2003), few of these studies have focused specifically on answering why customers are upset by other customers blame the firm rather than the specific misbehaving individuals, which in turn leads to customer dissatisfaction? The purpose of this study is to consider social surroundings and task definition in situational factor (Belk, 1975) into different situations interrupted by other customers, however, when other-customer failure happened, how consumers react to different kinds of tie strength(such as strong tie-best friend or weak tie-new friend knew for few days only),different purposes(such as celebrating or discussing specific issue), and how do consumers react to firm’s evaluation?
A 2 (tie strength: strong vs. weak) × 2 (group sizes: 2 people vs. 7 people) × 2 (purposes: celebrating birthday vs. discuss specific issue) between-subject factorial design was used to test our predictions. Subjects were exposed to a written scenario describing other-customer misbehavior in a restaurant. A restaurant context was chosen as appropriate for this study since real-life dysfunctional customer behavior is common in this industry (Harris and Reynolds, 2003).
The results of this study show that: Customers were less satisfied when the partners are beloning to strong tie and big group size, especially in utilitarian goal. People will get more confidence and support if their group is bigger and have strong tie relationship, when they suffered other-customer failure.
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