Understanding the Effects of Post-Service Experience Surveys on Delay and Acceleration of Customer Purchasing Behavior: Evidence From the Automotive Services Industry

Abstract

Service businesses today make extensive use of post-service experience surveys to obtain feedback from customers on service quality, satisfaction, and future repurchase behavior. Recent research has found that such surveys have the potential to evoke question-behavior effects (QBE) on participating customers and moreover suggests its impact on firm revenues is positive. However, our findings indicate that the effects may not always be beneficial. The research the authors report is set in the automotive quick lube industry and comprises two field experiments and a lab experiment. The authors find that customers participating in firm-sponsored surveys delay immediate service repurchases, thus reducing cash flows, but also accelerate subsequent ones in the following periods. Our results are explained by the inferences that customers make as they participate in such surveys, which affect customer behavior in a complex manner, and provide an additional mechanism to understand the operation of QBEs. One important caution emerging from this finding is that service firms conducting satisfaction surveys for tracking purposes on an ongoing basis should be careful not to survey customers too often.