The impact of outcome, competency and affect on service referral

Proposes a model to explain consumers’ willingness to recommend a service provider. The model considers four predictors of this phenomenon: affect, outcome, competency and courtesy. In a laboratory setting, subjects read and responded to a scenario describing a service encounter of a fictitious individual with a dry cleaner and/or an attorney. The subjects were later asked how likely they were to recommend this service provider to a friend experiencing a similar problem. Separate path analyses were performed to analyze each type of service encounter; and in both scenarios, outcome, competency, courtesy, joy and disgust were found to influence the likelihood that the consumer would recommend a particular service provider. The proposed model accounts for more than 72 percent of the variation in the subjects’ decision to recommend.