No abstract

Service failures represent temporary or permanent interruptions of the customer's regular service experience. Although the literature identifies an extensive set of organizational alternatives for recovering from service failures, researchers have approached these responses as discrete organizational actions that are loosely connected to the dynamic nature of the recovery experience. In this paper, we address this shortcoming by introducing the idea of the service recovery journey (SRJ). We first conceptualize the SRJ as the outcome of a service failure that is composed of three phases: pre-recovery, recovery, and post-recovery. We then synthesize the organizational responses to service failures reported in 230 journal articles and integrate them with the novel SRJ perspective. Thereafter, we provide an extensive set of questions for future research that will expand our knowledge about the pre-recovery, recovery, and post-recovery phases, and address the interaction between the customer's regular journey and the SRJ. Finally, we outline six considerations for recovery research seeking to affect business practice and discuss the managerial implications of adopting an SRJ perspective.

When they experience service failures, customers look for causes. They seek to understand whether the service firm could have prevented the failure (controllability attribution) and whether the cause of the failure is temporary or constant over time (stability attribution). To understand such attributions, we perform a meta-analysis. We find that causal attributions are related to emotional and cognitive reactions in several ways. First, controllability attributions elicit stronger negative emotions than do stability attributions. Second, controllability attributions directly affect only transaction-specific satisfaction, whereas stability attributions directly affect customers’ transaction-specific and overall satisfaction. Third, both attributions affect loyalty and negative word of mouth through negative emotions, overall satisfaction, and transaction-specific satisfaction. Finally, contextual (i.e., cultural values), methodological (i.e., type of failure), and measurement factors (i.e., measurement scale) partly explain studywise variation in the effects of attributions on customer outcomes. We recommend that companies manage reactions to service failure thrice: before customers formulate attributional beliefs, using fast and accurate communication; when the attributional beliefs are formed, offering employee assistance and compensations; and well after the attributional beliefs are established, providing feedback on process improvements by the company.