When and why signaling frontline employee inexperience can prove to be an asset: Effects on consumer forgiveness for service failure

Résumé En

The extant literature on service failure focuses mainly on how to recover from such incidents. However, companies can act before a service failure occurs to mitigate its negative effects. Building on signaling theory, we adopt a mixed‐method approach based on five studies using different types of analyses (textual and content analysis, and multivariate analysis) to investigate the effect of signaling frontline employee inexperience on customer responses to service failure due to an error committed by an employee. Five studies provide evidence that highlighting inexperience—either informally (through a conversation) or formally (through an in‐training badge)—can act as a signal that prompts customers to be more forgiving toward frontline employees, and such consumer forgiveness then serves as an underlying mechanism to explain repatronage intention. This research also tests and explores the boundary conditions for the effectiveness of the inexperience signal. Our findings have various implications for professionals showing how useful it can be to signal the inexperience of a frontline employee who makes an error that leads to a service failure to be given a second chance, and how certain precautions should be taken to avoid the pitfalls of such a signaling strategy.