It is quite impossible for a service firm to deliver service without failure. The main reason is that service is intangible, perishable, and heterogeneous in nature. Every service firm tries its best to recover service failure with understanding that ...
It is quite impossible for a service firm to deliver service without failure. The main reason is that service is intangible, perishable, and heterogeneous in nature. Every service firm tries its best to recover service failure with understanding that service failure affects customers' evaluation and attitude for the firm. Service recovery refers to actions a firm takes to recover a service failure and it becomes one of the hot issues after mid of 1990s. Because customers often react strongly to a service failure, it is critical that a firm's efforts to recover be equally strong and effective.
To build research framework the study adapts customers' satisfaction and dissatisfaction concept, expectancy disconfirmation, equity theory, and social justice of exchange.
The study investigates how customers' perceived justice of recovery(outcome, procedural, and interactional) after failure affects 1) satisfactions(service encounter satisfaction, overall firm satisfaction) and 2) behavioral intentions(positive word-of-mouth, purchase intentions). The study also investigates correlations and magnitude of correlations among the three variables - perceived justice of recovery, customer satisfaction, and behavioral intentions after recovery. The study employes an experimental research by using scenario method. The sample used in this research is divided into two groups(panel, general) intentionally to eliminate the bias that may occur when a scenario used. Three variables are applied to SPSS(ver 9.0) and LISREL(ver 8.2) for correlations and magnitude of correlations.
The research finds that;
(1) Customers' perceived justices of recovery are correlated to customer satisfaction after recovery - outcome justice(OJ) is strongly correlated to service encounter satisfaction(SS) and overall firm satisfaction(OS), and procedural justice(PJ) and interactional justice(IJ) are less strongly correlated to SS and OS than OJ to SS and OS.
(2) Customers' satisfaction after recovery affects customers' intentions - both SS and OS strongly affects positive word-of-mouth(PM) and purchase intentions(PI).
(3) Among the three perceived justices of recovery, outcome justice(OS) is much more influential to customer satisfaction after recovery than procedural justice(PJ) and interactional justice(IJ) are to customer satisfaction after recovery.
The results have implications to researchers and service marketing managers. For researchers, the result will be helpful for them to further develop service failure and recovery framework. For service marketing managers, the results will suggest specific guidelines for establishing service recovery strategies.