Is maximum customer service always a good thing? Customer satisfaction in response to over‐attentive service

Purpose – To investigate customer satisfaction with service encounters characterized by an over‐attentive level of service, and the contextual and individual factors moderating the resulting satisfaction scores.Design/methodology/approach – The first of three formal experiments tests the prediction that consumer reactions vary with the margin between actual and expected levels of service. The second examines the influence of the tendency to psychological reactance on participants’ responses to excessive service. The third assesses the effect of a predisposition to suspiciousness on satisfaction scores, in scenarios which, respectively, specify that extremely over‐attentive service or “normal” service are directed at participants personally or is offered to all customers unselectively.Findings – The first experiment found moderately excessive service to be acceptable to most participants but unexpectedly over‐attentive service to affect satisfaction negatively. The second found the negative impact of extre...