Don´t Try Harder: Using Customer Inoculation to Build Resistance against Service Failures

Capitalizing on a large-scale field experimental data set involving 1254 airline customers, this study introduces customer inoculation as a proactive strategy for mitigating negative consequences of service failures on customer satisfaction. By contrast, traditional strategies focus on addressing service failures after they have occurred. This study shows that customer inoculation eases the decrease in satisfaction when customers experience a service failure. Additional analyses indicate that customer inoculation has no harmful effects on customer satisfaction if no service failure occurs. This finding sets inoculation apart from expectation management and underscores the potential inoculation has for marketing practice.