ABSTRACT
Numerous marketing gurus urge firms to deliver a more memorable customer experience by managing the customer’s emotional experience, not just the functional and physical experience. But managing the emotional experience assumes access to a reliable method of evaluating what is being experienced. Although enthusiasts advocate the use of behavioural or physiological measures of emotions, the only current practical option is structured self-reports. This chapter investigates the self-report measures of emotions provided by a random sample of consumers for a crossed, random sample of online service providers. The results indicate that very little of the variance in self-reported emotions is due to service providers. Rather, the substantial sources of variance in reported emotions are consumers and the interaction between consumers and service providers. This evidence calls into question the managerial usefulness of self-reported emotion measures and the assumption that service providers can measure and manage the emotions that make for memorable service experiences.
