By better understanding how emotion influences the willingness or ability of customers and employees to participate in service production, we can refine our ability to design operational processes that are both efficiently delivered and poised to improve customer engagement over the long term.
“Mitigating the Negative Effects of Customer Anxiety by Facilitating Access to Human Contact”
Prior research in social psychology has shown that when people feel anxious, they seek advice from others. Yet, companies that operate in high-anxiety settings (like financial services, health care, and education) are increasingly deploying self-service technologies (SSTs), through which anxious customers transact without access to human contact. These companies may therefore face a classic efficiency-service tradeoff where gains in operational efficiency through automation also hamper service outcomes by neglecting customer anxiety. This paper, set in the high-anxiety domain of financial services, investigates the value of facilitating access to human contact during SST usage.
In a field experiment conducted within the context of a credit union’s SST loan-approval process, an invitation to connect with a human loan agent increases the customer uptake rate of approved loans by 24%. Subsequent controlled laboratory experiments, which explicitly investigate the linkages among anxiety, choice satisfaction, and firm trust during SST encounters show that compared to participants without anxiety, those who are anxious consistently report lower satisfaction with their choices and less trust in the firm, regardless of the source of their anxiety. When anxiety is related to the SST encounter, facilitating access to human contact dampens anxiety’s negative effects on choice satisfaction and, by extension, increases firm trust. We further observe that these benefits of facilitating access to human contact arise even though very few customers choose to access a person. Taken together, this research reveals an opportunity for firms to maintain operational efficiency in high-anxiety self-service settings without compromising customer experiences and service outcomes.
Awards
INFORMS Behavioral Operations Section 2019 Best Working Paper Award, First Place
POMS College of Behavior in Operations Management 2019 Junior Scholar Paper Competition, Second Place
Media Coverage (Subscriptions May be Required)
Business Insider, November 26, 2024, “Customer Service Hits a New Low”
Business Insider, September 4, 2024, “The hot new status symbol: Phone Calls”
Washington Post, March 13, 2023, “Vanishing customer support is driving us all insane”
Vox, January 26, 2023, “The death of the customer service hotline”
AARP, September 10, 2021, “Chatbots May Deliver the Best Customer Care”
Insights at Questrom, December 7, 2020, “Who does AI help: Customers or Companies?”
Harvard Business Review Webinar, September 25, 2019. Listen to the replay here
Harvard Business Review Magazine, July-August 2019, “IdeaWatch: How Necessary Is the Human Touch?”
Harvard Business Review (April 2019, Digital Article)
HBS Working Knowledge Infographic (April 2019)