How can organizational tolerance toward frontline employees’ errors help service recovery?

Abstract

While work on service failures has recently begun to investigate aspects of service recovery systems from an organizational perspective, little attention has been paid to the specific practice of organizational error tolerance in the service marketing literature. One important gap is the lack of an integrated perspective of the outcomes of such a policy on service recovery. The literature also ignores the differences in internal and external perspectives of service failure and their impact on openly communicating the policy. To address this issue, we examined how and under what conditions organizational error tolerance can help improve the experience of customers who encounter service failure caused by frontline employees. We opted for a multilevel qualitative approach in the retail sector, leading to four propositions. After identifying the mechanisms through which an error tolerance policy can generate positive outcomes -within certain limits -for customers in cases of service failure, we argue that such organizational error tolerance conflicts with the demanding attitude of today's customers, and their negative representation of individual errors. This tension makes it difficult for service providers to reveal their error tolerance policy, giving rise to what we refer to as an "informational blind spot".

When and why signaling frontline employee inexperience can prove to be an asset: Effects on consumer forgiveness for service failure

“…Such reactions can take the form of giving companies a second chance when the recovery strategy meets customer expectations in terms of apology, resolving the issue, or offering compensation (Harrison‐Walker, 2019; Ringberg et al, 2007). By providing this second chance, consumers forgive the company and agree to look beyond the incident (Cusin & Flacandji, 2021). In a service or retail context, forgiveness is conceptualized as a process that follows a service failure and starts with a cognitive reframing of the failure, resulting in the negative emotions associated with the failure being cast aside, prompting motivational outcomes and, more specifically, less incentive to punish the service provider (Zourrig et al, 2009).…”

Customer responses to airline companies' service failure and recovery strategies: the moderating role of service failure habit

“…Before the COVID-19 pandemic and in the two years since, delivering a "zero-defect" experience has represented the most difficult challenge for any service provider (Florido-Benı ´tez, 2022;Cusin and Flacandji, 2021). Because of a wide range of different factors, both within and without the service provider's control (Koc, 2019), problems can arise at any time or any place during a service encounter.…”