The Effects of Consumer Vulnerability on Service Evaluations and Wellbeing Outcomes

Working with a large health service provider, we explore the effects of consumer vulnerability on post-service failure evaluations, outcomes, and behaviors. First, we introduce an individual-level, multidimensional construct of consumer vulnerability (potential harm, perceived level of risk, perceived level of control). Then, we develop a framework of post-service failure evaluations, outcomes, and behavior as a function of consumer vulnerability. Consumer vulnerability in the health care domain is of utmost importance, as patients may experience physical pain, psychological pain, illness, fear of the unknown, and a perceived lack of control during the service interaction (Berry and Bendapudi 2007). Not only can service failures in health care lead to objective harm to patients/consumers, the resulting drops in service quality and customer satisfaction scores can lead to decreases in federal funding for the health care institution and decreases in pay-for-performance for providers. Our key research question is: how does consumer vulnerability influence evaluations of the service experience, complaint behavior, and ultimately the health and well-being of the consumer? In examining department-level patient satisfaction and complaint data, we identified a positive correlation between complaint rates and customer satisfaction levels in some departments; these departments received high patient satisfaction scores but also high rates of complaints. We believe that the different levels of consumer vulnerability within each department may be driving this relationship, perhaps due to the differences in customer expectations for the service encounter and differences in the criticality of care.