Chezy Ofir and Itamar Simonson
Executive Summary
It is now widely accepted that exceeding customer expectations is key to customer satisfaction, delight, and loyalty. Accordingly, it is critical for marketers to try to find out in advance what their customers’ expectations are, because a failure to meet or exceed these expectations could lead to dissatisfaction and defection. In the current research, the authors examine the impact of measuring customers’ expectations just before a shopping or consumption experience (e.g., before entering a store or a bank) on the subsequent evaluation of that experience and the service provider.
Prior research indicates that customers who are forewarned before a service encounter that they will be asked subsequently to evaluate that service provide more negative postexperience evaluations than customers who are unaware of an upcoming service evaluation task. Consistent with these findings, the authors propose that stating expectations before a consumption experience causes consumers to evaluate their experience online (e.g., while shopping) and that negative aspects receive greater attention and emphasis, leading to more negative (i.e., lower) satisfaction. Thus, asking customers to articulate their expectations before a consumption or shopping experience can backfire and lead to lower postpurchase evaluations.
Consistent with this prediction, a series of field experiments indicate that participants who state prepurchase expectations focus on negative aspects of the shopping experience and perceive the same performance more negatively than those in a control group. The tendency to rate shopping experiences less favorably produced by stating prepurchase expectations is inconsistent with confirmation bias as well as assimilation, contrast, and positivity effects. The final study contrasts the impact of stating expectations about the next store shopping experience with the impact of evaluating the store’s prior performance. The results show that though (prepurchase) expectations were indistinguishable from evaluations of the store’s prior performance, the former led to lower postpurchase than prepurchase evaluations, whereas the latter tended to generate higher postpurchase evaluations.
The current findings indicate that though knowing what customers expect is important, marketers should be careful not to create (perceived) bad experiences by measuring expectations in temporal proximity to the actual experience. Because many customer experiences are ongoing, such as many continuous relationships between vendors and business customers or between a supermarket or a bank and its frequent customers, there may not be a good time for measuring expectations. In such situations, marketers may be better off avoiding measurement of customer expectations and relying instead on measures of satisfaction.
At a more general level, customer relationship management calls for developing a more intimate knowledge of customers. In turn, this prescription suggests a more extensive use of customer surveys. However, although there are significant differences among specific types of measures used in customer research, in general, marketers should beware of overreliance on customer surveys, such as measuring service expectations. Indeed, the current research suggests that stating expectations can have a detrimental impact on customers’ experiences and relationships with the firm.
Biography
Chezy Ofir conducts research and teaches marketing in the School of Business Administration at Hebrew University. His research has appeared in leading journals, such as Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, Psychometrika, Management Science, British Journal of Mathematical and Statistical Psychology, Journal of Forecasting, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Multivariate Behavior Research, and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. He won the American Marketing Association Best Services Award for his article that appeared in Journal of Marketing Research. Chezy is the founder and academic director of the executive MBA in Strategic Management, tailored for chief executive officers. He also has served (15 years) as the head of the Marketing Area in the Hebrew University School of Business. He holds and MBA and PhD in Business Administration from Columbia University.
Itamar Simonson is the Sebastian S. Kresge Professor of Marketing in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. Itamar has published 50 articles in leading marketing and decision-making journals, primarily in the areas of buyer decision making, consumer choice, and marketing management. He has won many awards for his research, including the best article published in Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Marketing Research O’Dell Award (two times), the best article in Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, the Association for Consumer Research Ferber Award, and the American Marketing Association award for the best article on services marketing. At Stanford, Dr. Simonson has taught MBA courses on marketing management, marketing to businesses, and technology marketing, as well as doctoral-level courses on buyer behavior, buyer research methods, and decision making. Itamar serves on eight editorial boards of leading marketing and decision-making journals.
Journal of Marketing Research, Vol. XLIV, No. 1, February 2007
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