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PurposeThe objective of this paper is to highlight the importance of information technology in service recovery performance through the exploration of its influence on service recovery performance components and determinants.Design/methodology/approachA general inductive approach for analyzing qualitative data was adopted since the main research question of “How can information technology enable successful service recovery?” has not been examined in the complaint management literature. Data were collected through in‐depth interviews with key executives working in the Tunisian banking sector.FindingsDrawing on the knowledge‐based view (KBV), the authors develop a general framework to understand the differences in service recovery performance (SRP). The research shows that various knowledge‐based resources such as customer orientation (CO), internal orientation (IO), and information technology (IT) complement one another to impact on SRP. Ignoring the complementarities of these resources in assessing SRP can seriously underestimate the impact of IT on the knowledge assets that are embedded in the firm recovery competency. This distinctive business competency is labelled knowledge enabled recovery effectiveness (KERE).Research limitations/implicationsGiven the exploratory nature of this study, these preliminary results need quantitative research to refine theory and measurement of service recovery capabilities and for future validation of the proposed framework.Practical implicationsThe findings provide important implications for the effective design and the automation of complaint management and for the intervening mechanisms that govern the IT business value.Originality/valueThe paper examines the issue of complaint management from a knowledge based view and calls for the need to consider specific customer relationship management (CRM) areas as a set of knowledge based activities.