Who Is to Blame? The Effect of Customer Education on the Locus of Responsibility in B2B Service Failure

This paper examines how customer education shapes responsibility attribution following service failures in B2B contexts. Drawing on a qualitative study and a scenario-based experiment with 536 participants, we show that customer education reduces blame directed at the service provider and increases attribution to the customer, third parties, and uncontrollable factors, especially when education is proactive. These effects are mediated by customer competence and moderated by customer openness. Our findings position customer education as a proactive service recovery strategy and offer a nuanced understanding of its role in attribution management within complex B2B relationships.