Empowerment, attribution and apologising as dimensions of service recovery

Abstract

IntroductionBusiness managers frequently refer to the competitive nature of the markets they serve. The increasing globalisation of business is often cited as a major contributing factor. Managers of service firms in countries which are signatories of the Uruguay Round of the GATT agreement, in particular, may soon feel the uncomfortable heat of increased competition as protective trade barriers are systematically removed. This development is likely to re-establish customer retention as a strategic marketing objective. The renewed focus on the advantages (lower costs, increasingly profitable sales, market share growth and long-term profitability) of a loyal customer base will turn service firm managers' customer complaint handling efforts into a focal point (Rust and Zahorik, 1993). This is occurring against the background of findings by Best and Andreassen (1977) that not only are service customers more likely to experience problems (one out of three compared to one out of five for goods) and voice complaints, but they are also less likely to be satisfied with customer complaint handling than customers of goods companies.Two factors complicate the management of service failures. First, the simultaneity of production and consumption implies that, when service failures do occur, the presence of customers leaves little scope for corrective action without the customer being aware of the mishap. Second, satisfactory redress is, at times, difficult. Simultaneous production and consumption often renders "undoing", and even re-doing, a service impossible.Although the high level of human involvement in many services and the simultaneity of production and consumption make the occasional service failure almost inevitable, Hart et al. (1990) point out that dissatisfied customers are not inevitable. Service firms can go a long way towards turning disgruntled customers into satisfied ones who are likely to maintain the business relationship with the firm through effective service recovery programmes. Effective service recovery does not occur by luck, however, nor is it solely driven by the interpersonal skills of frontline employees (Bell and Ridge, 1992, p. 58). It needs to be a planned and well-managed process. Service recovery planning ought to be based on research-based knowledge in order to avoid the harmful

What Drives Successful Complaint Resolutions on Social Media?: Evidence from the Airline Industry

“…al. [25], as the correlations are based on a substantially larger corpus in comparison to other similar work [40] [27] [29], and also because their effectiveness of deriving personality traits has been independently validated and used by other researchers [36] [28].…”

“…It might not matter how friendly, pleasant, or attentive an employee is to a customer if the employee is not able to solve the problem or to be seen as trying to help, as the customer will just become more dissatisfied [35]. Prior studies find that full empowerment to solve the complaint immediately has a significant impact on satisfaction with the recovery [36]. However, it is questionable whether the brands providing customer service on social media today have the ability and authority to fully rectify customer complaints.…”

“…Given a vector containing the correlation coefficients, and a vector containing word counts of corresponding word categories, the trait is computed as the dot product of the two vectors, i.e. a linear combination of the word counts weighted by the correlation coefficients [36]. For this study, we adopt the significant correlations from Yarkoni et.…”

Understanding satisfying service encounters in retail banking - a dyadic perspective

“…Empowerment allows employees to deal with customers efficiently and it is argued that empowerment is vital for service companies that require face-to-face contact between customers and frontline employees (Baron and Harris, 2003;Boshoff and Leong, 1998).…”

The Role of Long-Term Orientation and Service Recovery on the Relationships between Trust, Bonding, Customer Satisfaction and Customer Loyalty: The Case of Nigerian Retail Banks

“…However, the findings of these studies are mixed and thus, inconclusive. Similarly, many studies have reported significant effect of customer complaints (e.g., Awwad, 2011;Fornell, Johnson, Anderson, Cha, & Bryant, 1996;Zeithaml, Berry, & Parasuraman, 1996) and service recovery (e.g., Boshoff, 1999;Boshoff & Leong, 1998;Dewitt, Nguyen, & Marshall, 2007;Kitapci & Dortyol, 2009) on customer loyalty. Yet, service recovery application is not quite understood in the banking sector (Kumunda & Osarenkhoe, 2012).…”