Cross-Buying After Product Failure Recovery? Depends on How You Feel About it

Cross-selling to customers during product failure recovery (PFR) encounters can be challenging as customers are reluctant to cross-buy after having recently experienced a failure, despite it being 5 recovered. We examine several models of cross-buying and failure/recovery characteristics using a large-scale experiment and secondary transaction data from a Fortune 100 computer systems firm. We find that customers’ integral-affective responses dominate their cognitive responses. Further, customers are more willing to cross-buy when the firm's recovery effort increases for more severe product failures or those with unstable attributions. Yet, greater recovery effort does little to 10 diminish the negative effect of attributing the failure to the firm. Overall, understanding the relative dominance of a sequence of affective versus cognitive factors and the critical role that contextual factors play in customer cross-buying decisions will help managers design PFR encounters to increase the odds of cross-selling.