Emotional Factors in the Service Experience in the COVID-19 Environment:

Abstract

The aim of this study is to identify factors that evoke customer emotion and how this emotion influences the service experience in the context of changes in the business environment brought about by COVID-19. A questionnaire survey, consisting mainly of open-ended questions, was conducted to obtain data on customers’ experiences. We used a combination of qualitative and quantitative analyses of these data. The results showed that (1) the impression of service experience differs depending on the type of customer emotion (dominance, arousal, or pleasure), (2) the enhancement effect of pleasure on the impression of the service experience is more pronounced in the case of intense emotion, and (3) when there was a response to COVID-19 by either the firm or the customer and not the other, the impression of the service experience was more likely to decline. Based on these findings, we provide some practical implications for marketing in the COVID-19 environment.

Keywords

• covid-19
• coronavirus disease
• customer emotion
• experience management