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    Mitigating the Negative Effects of Customer Anxiety Through Access to Human Contact
    26 Mar 2019Working Paper Summaries

    Mitigating the Negative Effects of Customer Anxiety Through Access to Human Contact

    by Michelle A. Shell and Ryan W. Buell
    Firms increasingly deploy self-service technologies (SSTs) to manage customer interfaces that are inherently stressful. For example, patients may be asked to use kiosks to check themselves into hospitals. This study finds that customer anxiety during SST transactions can reduce customers’ trust in the service provider. Operational design choices may help.
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    Author Abstract

    It is a well-established result in social psychology that when people feel anxious, they seek advice from others. However, increasingly companies that operate in high-anxiety settings (like financial services, health care, and education) are deploying self-service technologies (SSTs), through which anxious customers transact without human contact. The impact of customer anxiety on service relationships is neither well understood, nor consistently factored into service design. In this paper, two laboratory experiments and one field experiment, conducted in financial service contexts, document the negative effects of anxiety on customer choice satisfaction, firm trust, and long-term engagement and explore the impact of giving self-service consumers the option to interact with a person. Participants engaged in an online investing simulation who are made to feel anxious due to market downturns are less satisfied with their choices and report lower levels of trust in the firm. Providing participants with the opportunity to interact with an expert, or even another participant, dampens anxiety’s negative effects on choice satisfaction and, by extension, firm trust. Interestingly, we find that very few participants who are offered the option to interact with a person take advantage of the opportunity, which is consistent with the idea that it is the mere availability of human contact that mitigates anxiety’s deleterious effects. Finally, in a field experiment conducted with a credit union’s self-service term loan approval process, the incorporation of access to human contact increased customer loan acceptance by 16%, suggesting that access to human contact can improve long-term service engagement.

    Paper Information

    • Full Working Paper Text
    • Working Paper Publication Date: February 2019
    • HBS Working Paper Number: HBS Working Paper #19-089
    • Faculty Unit(s): Technology and Operations Management
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    Ryan W. Buell
    Ryan W. Buell
    Professor of Business Administration
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    Michelle A. Shell
    Michelle A. Shell
    Visiting Scholar
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