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Service leaders have learned that it is not enough to attract customers who are ready and willing to experience what their organizations have to offer; they must also attract customers who are able to perform important roles in co-producing a successful service experience. This recognition has led to increasing interest regarding how organizations should manage these quasi-employees to ensure everything that must be done actually is done. Leading service organizations embrace this responsibility and have developed strategies to identify and accommodate variations in their targeted customers' capabilities. They know that client satisfaction depends upon the organization making up for deficiencies between what the customer must do to have a great service experience and what the customer actually can do. Surprisingly, there has been little systematic investigation into how organizations create and execute strategies to ensure that these deficiency gaps are filled. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that organizations that have developed systems and procedures to fill these gaps are likelier to satisfy their customers and achieve higher levels of repeat business than firms that have not. This article offers strategies for organizations that commit to bridging the customer can-do/must-do gap and thereby ensuring their customers have a successful service experience.

Road rage, school rage, and customer rage are becoming almost everyday occurrences. Customer rage is an intense anger coupled with expressions of physical, verbal, or other potentially harmful behaviors in response to a dissatisfying service experience. It can potentially result in severe negative consequences for firms, employees, and even other valued customers. Fortune 500 firms are so concerned about this problem that some are installing new software in their call centers to detect rising levels of anger in customers' voices so that management may intervene to prevent an incident escalating to rage. Furthermore, the Entrepreneur magazine noted that Americans are getting angrier every year. This article examines the underlying psychological processes of stress and coping that propel some consumers to experience extreme negative emotions, including rage and, finally, resentment. It explores the triggers (antecedent conditions) that give rise to rage behaviors; identifies the tipping points for extreme anger and rage incidents; and explores the extent to which these circumstances and coping behaviors can be generalized across Eastern and Western cultures. It also recommends a course of action to enable managers to prevent or, at least, better manage customer rage.