What Unhappy Customers Teach Us About the Role of Temporality in Customer Experience

This chapter applies the Model of Temporality in Consumption to the context of customer complaint behaviourcustomer complaint behaviour. In using this model, practitioners can understand the importance of time to customers in all aspects of experiential consumptionexperiential consumption. When perceived as a valuable resource, customers are concerned about the amount of time spent on being involved in any and all aspects of the complaint process. When perceived as a rate of movement, customers are concerned about the passage of timepassage of time throughout the complaint process, whether too slowly, too quickly or as hoped for. When perceived as a moment of now, customers are concerned with how the moment in the complaint process feels; whether pleasurable or not. When perceived as a memory or vision, customers are both looking back to previous complaint experiences and, considering how future complaint experiences might unfold. In all cases, many customers perceive the use of social media and mobile devices to be enhances of temporal experience. In other words, most customers believe, sometimes mistakenly, the use of their smartphones or tablets will facilitate better use of time than not using them. This chapter ends with application to complaints in the context of luxuryluxury London hotels, as the context in which the research for this book was conducted.