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臺大管理論叢
第
27
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1
期
119
activity or phenomenon. During an interview, respondents are simply asked to recall specific
events; they can use their own terms and language. By conducting focus groups, we are able
to add follow-up questions to arrive at a better description and understanding of the critical
incidents. Furthermore, examining such memorable critical incidents allows us to gain
insights into the key factors leading to consumer dissatisfaction. In data analysis, there are
two tasks tackled–one is the decision on a theoretical frame of reference to describe the
incidents and the other is the inductive development of constructing prospect’s self-recovery
behavior. In other words, we use content analysis to reveal which events occurred in the
critical incidents, and then use interpreting methodology as a means of interpreting and
understanding that experience. In addition, the focus of this study is in relation to affective
reactions. To do this, we must identify individual emotions, which are particularly relevant to
the service encounter. Thus, we employ a functional analysis of emotions that involves three
sequential phases: (1) problem to be solved (i.e., the antecedents of the emotion), (2) system
of components (including physiological, emotional, and behavioral components), and (3)
consequence. In line with sequential critical incident analysis, we further translate functional
analysis into a corresponding framework of cause, course, and result. Based on these
theoretical foundations, we analyze and construct the prospect’s recovery behavior via three
sequential phases: (1) after the service encounter failure, (2) before the next luxury goods
store visit, and (3) on the proceeding service experience within luxury goods store.
We summarize our findings as below. First, by following the literature of critical
incident classification in the service encounter, we identify respondents’ perceived service
failures into three categories: “employee response to service delivery system failures”,
“employee response to customer needs and requests”, and “unprompted and unsolicited
employee actions.” The result reveals that the most frequently mentioned incidents are
unprompted and unsolicited employee actions. This shows that there is an inequity of role
expectation between service frontline employee and prospector, which then leads to the
consequence of non-process interdependency. Secondly, we also find that when experiencing
service failures, most respondents tend to blame service failure on themselves instead of on
service providers, which indicates the locus of causality is usually located on the prospect in
the luxury industry.
Third of all, service encounters are role performances in which both customers and
service providers have roles to enact. The belief of Service Locus-Of-Control (SLOC) in
prospects’ mind will impact their behavior when customers face service encounter failure.
Generally speaking, customers with strong internal SLOC beliefs are likely to maintain an