First impressions vs. The Peak-End Rule: Episodic evaluations in a service experience and the moderating effect of retrospective delay

This article integrates prior research on episodic evaluations with the service experience literature to investigate the impact of multiple interactions with frontline employees on customer evaluations of the employees and overall satisfaction with the service experience. A field study was constructed of customer interactions with hotel staff, including over 5,000 customer stays across a 5-year period. The results reveal that key moments, specifically the first impression, peak impressions, and last impressions, significantly impact satisfaction with the overall hotel stay. Moreover, we also introduce a new construct, retrospective delay, which is the time lapse between the actual service experience and the evaluation of the experience. In doing so, unlike prior research indicating the robustness of the peak-end rule, our results find that first impressions are the most important contributor to frontline employee evaluations and overall satisfaction. Furthermore, we find that first impressions become more critical as retrospective delay increases. Our results suggest that first impressions not only impact frontline employee evaluations and satisfaction with the service encounter, but that measurement timing could explain some conflicting findings in the services literature regarding the efficacy of positive starts.