Service and Experience with J. N. Halm: Pre-service deservingness: How prior behaviour can shape the court of public opinion

Do bad people, individuals who have engaged in one horrible act or another, deserve bad things to happen to them? For instance, let’s take an individual who happens to be a terrible neighbour, disturbing the peace of the entire community and is not liked by any of his neighbours. Now, say this individual happens to go get a cup of coffee, and the waitress accidentally spills hot coffee on the individual.

And rather than apologise, the waitress actually claims it is the customer’s fault. Is that individual not owed the best service recovery that this coffee shop can muster?  Should we all not be outraged—at the shop and the waitress, at their handling of the situation? Is the lack of an apology and immediate remedial actions not a fundamental violation of a paying customer’s dignity?

How then is it that the outrage people feel about the way that individual has been treated begins to go down when they get to know the kind of person he is? Is that not unfair? When details emerged about the customer’s background, should that affect the way we perceive the supposed injustice done to him? Should the court of public opinion not stand behind a bad person who has received bad customer service?

Should poor customer service situations not be treated separately from the kind of human being the customer is? Or is it karma just doing what karma does? Anyway, if you are grappling with where you stand on this particular issue, you are not alone. As a matter of fact, there is even a name for this phenomenon. It is called pre-service deservingness. Yes, you read right! Pre-Service Deservingness!

A remarkable study published in the September 2025 edition of the Psychology & Marketing journal introduces this concept. Pre-Service Deservingness can be said to be the judgments that third-party observers form about a customer’s conduct or character before the service encounter even begins, and demonstrates, across four studies, that these judgments significantly shape how observers respond when that customer later experiences a service failure.

The finding is as counterintuitive as it is important. Conventional wisdom in service research has focused almost exclusively on what happens during and after the service encounter—the nature of the failure, the quality of the recovery, the manner of the apology.

All of these factors matter enormously, and the literature on them is rich and well-established. But this study reveals a critical gap: the pre-service behaviour of the customer, entirely unrelated to the failure itself, changes the entire emotional and moral calculus of the people watching.

Specifically, the research shows that when a customer is perceived as undeserving of the service—when third-party observers have formed a negative prior judgement of that customer based on their pre-service conduct—that customer’s complaint about a service failure does not generate the typical wave of sympathy and negative brand sentiment that service failure complaints ordinarily produce. Interestingly, observers do not simply withhold their sympathy.

They go further. They shift the blame onto the complaining customer. And they actively support the brand—not out of any particular loyalty to it, but out of what the researchers call justice-restorative motives. They are not defending the company. They are, in their own minds, restoring fairness.

As a matter of fact, this distinction between brand defence and justice restoration is one of the most intellectually interesting aspects of the research. We might assume that a third party who supports a brand in the face of a complaint is simply a loyal customer or a brand advocate. What this study reveals is that something else can be at work—a fairness heuristic, a deeply human instinct to ensure that people receive what they deserve and not what they do not.

When an observer decides that a complaining customer is undeserving, the act of supporting the brand against that customer feels, to the observer, like a morally correct response. It feels just. The brand becomes, in this framing, not the villain of the story but the aggrieved party deserving of protection.

This is territory that service research has not previously mapped, and the implications are considerable. We have long understood that service failures carry reputational risk—that a customer who complains publicly can damage a brand’s standing, drive away potential customers, and create a narrative that is difficult and expensive to reverse.

The standard advice to businesses has therefore been to respond swiftly, apologise genuinely, and resolve the matter as visibly as possible. All of this remains sound guidance. But it now needs to be accompanied by a new awareness: the identity and prior conduct of the complaining customer is not a neutral factor in how the public will receive the complaint.

I have realised that this finding places a powerful but ethically complex tool in the hands of brand managers. The research suggests that brands can, in principle, strategically navigate service failures by leveraging third-party justice perceptions—by allowing or even encouraging the circumstances of the complainant’s pre-service behaviour to become part of the public narrative.

If observers can be guided towards a perception of pre-service undeservingness, the complaint loses much of its damaging force and may even generate active brand defence from the very audience the complaint was intended to turn against the company.

But here is where we must slow down and think carefully. The fact that something can be done does not mean that it should be. A strategy that involves drawing attention to a complaining customer’s past conduct—particularly when that conduct is unrelated to the service failure—is one that raises serious ethical questions about fairness, transparency, and the power differential between a large corporation and an individual customer.

The same justice instinct that third parties apply to the complaining customer can, and should, also be applied to the brand. A company that is perceived to be weaponising a customer’s background to deflect accountability for a legitimate failure is not restoring justice. It is abusing the very shortcut the research describes.

One can only imagine how quickly such a strategy would unravel if it were to become visible. In an era of social media scrutiny and investigative journalism, brand behaviour is observed and analysed with a thoroughness that no communications strategy can fully outwit.

The company that is seen to be attacking a complaining customer’s character rather than addressing the substance of their complaint risks something far worse than the original service failure. It risks being perceived as exactly the kind of self-serving, justice-averse organisation that consumer cynicism has always suspected lurks behind the glossy exterior of corporate customer care.

The more instructive takeaway from this research, from a managerial perspective, is the light it sheds on the psychology of the third-party observer. Businesses tend to think of service failure audiences in binary terms—the aggrieved customer on one side, the watching public on the other, with the brand caught between them. What this study reveals is that the watching public is not a passive jury waiting to be persuaded. It is an active participant in a moral drama, making rapid fairness judgments based on all available information, not only the information that is directly relevant to the failure at hand.

Understanding this should make brands more thoughtful about the full context in which their service encounters take place—and more humble about the limits of their own control over the narrative. The court of public opinion is always in session. It does not wait for the facts to be fully established. And it brings to every case a set of fairness instincts that are older and more deeply embedded than any service recovery protocol ever written.

In the end, the safest strategy a brand can pursue is also the oldest one: treat every customer fairly, regardless of who they are and what they may have done before they walked through the door. Not because the public is always watching—though it is—but because fairness, in service as in life, has a way of being its own defence.

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