Do customer relationships mitigate or amplify failure responses?

Service failures can have a damaging impact on company profitability. Prior research demonstrates that robust relationships with customers may mitigate the negative impact of a service failure on behavioral outcome variables, such as repatronage intentions and word-of-mouth. Yet other research finds that customer relationships may actually intensify this negative impact on word-of-mouth and complaining. In earlier research, customersʹ relationships with service marketers are conceptualized as a uni-dimensional construct ranging from a low level of intensity to high intensity. This research demonstrates that a two-dimensional conceptualization of customersʹ relationships with service marketers—the Personality-Relatedness and Reciprocity (PRR) framework (Kaltcheva and Parasuraman, 2009)—can account for the seemingly discrepant results in the literature. This article leads to the formulation of a framework—the PRR-Failure Control framework—that links customer relationship strategies to failure control solutions.