Customers’ tales: Special-request motives and responses to frontline employees’ denials

Abstract

This research investigates customers’ motivations for making special requests and their reactions to frontline employees’ (FLEs’) denials within the frameworks of service-dominant (S-D) logic, the service triad, and value co-creation. While prior research has investigated FLEs’ perspectives on this topic, little is known about why customers make special requests (i.e., motives) and how they react to FLEs’ denials, which can lead to value co-destruction. Using 400 critical incidents in Study 1 and 596 customer responses in Study 2, a scenario-based experiment, we find that customers make special requests not just to solve problems, as previous research suggests, but also to fulfill personal p..