Service Climate as a Moderator of the Effects of Customer-to-Customer Interactions on Customer Support and Service Quality

Abstract

This study introduces customer-perceived service climate, which captures an individual customer’s perception of the extent to which a service organization teaches, prioritizes, and recognizes outstanding customer service through organizational practices and procedures. Such a perception is found to significantly and positively influence the outcomes of a customer’s already positive interactions with other customers as well as temper outcomes associated with a customer’s negative experience of another customer’s dysfunctional behaviors. Longitudinal results demonstrate that customer-perceived service climate creates a potential “spillover” effect, where positive influences of a strong service climate benefit an organization in two ways—both through employee actions (as previous research shows) and through customer actions toward one another (i.e., supportive behaviors—as the current study demonstrates). The development of such supportive behaviors among customers is shown to be critical, as it is these support behaviors from other customers, and not positive or negative customer-to-customer (C2C) interactions themselves, that ultimately influence a customer’s judgment of organizational service quality. Service organizations should be aware of the importance of developing positive customer perceptions of service climate to help in positively influencing C2C interactions as well as focusing upon the development of a service environment that enables C2C support behaviors.