Recovering service failure through resource integration

Abstract

Customers and employees can co-create a resolution following a service failure through integrating their resources. Their activities and interactions during resource-integration shape the customers' service recovery experiences. Prior research overlooks resource integration between all involved actors in a co-created service recovery process. This research details the process with two empirical studies. Study 1 is a qualitative analysis of narratives of service recovery experiences; Study 2 is a quantitative assessment of scenario-based survey data. The results show that a favourable service recovery experience is resulted from integrating all involved actors' resources in a mutually beneficial manner. Three key resources are financial compensation, service skills including communication and timing. Our findings indicate that co-created service recovery fails in the absence of just one resource or mismatches in their integration. The combined studies reveal that customers use their justice perceptions to assess activities and interactions for resource integration in service recovery.

Does the Co‐Creation of Service Recovery Create Value for Customers? The Underlying Mechanism of Motivation and the Role of Operant Resources

“…Second, as Xu et al (2014b) have noted, resource integration in service recovery is always context-specific and experiential. Thus, understanding the context-specific factors that affect co-recovery behaviour could provide fruitful insights.…”

“…We treat it as a multi-dimensional construct (second order factor) by showing that consumers co-recover through information sharing, responsible behaviour, and personal interaction. Our treatment of co-recovery in-role behaviour as a cocreation in-role behaviour after a service failure (by sharing the same dimensions) is based on the work of Xu et al (2014b) who argued that customers are also resource integrators in a service recovery context as they are involved in service delivery.…”

“…Despite the importance of service failures and service recovery, to date little research has focused on the service recovery context from the perspective of value co-creation (see Dong et al, 2008;Roggeveen et al, 2012;Xu et al, 2014aXu et al, , 2014bHeidenreich et al, 2015;Guo et al, 2016), which in the service failure-recovery context could be referred to as value co-recovery. Customers' participation in service recovery has been found to influence satisfaction with the service recovery process, perceived value of future co-creation, intentions regarding future participation (Dong et al, 2008), perceived justice (Xu et al, 2014b) and relationship-based self-esteem (Guo et al, 2016). However, the positive influence of customer participation exists only when customer did not cause or was a part of the failure (Roggeveen et al, 2012;Heidenreich et al, 2015).…”

The Effect of Customer Participation Types on Online Recovery Satisfaction: A Mental Accounting Perspective

“…Dong, Evans, and Zou [30] first introduced customer participation in service recovery and defined it as "the degree to which the customer is involved in taking actions to respond to a service failure". Scholars have verified that customer participation can lead to positive post-recovery behavior, such as perceived service quality [32], satisfaction and repurchase intention [25,34], positive word of mouth [16,38], experience with service recovery [39], and intention for future co-creation [31,40].…”

“…Because customer participation can bring the above advantages, scholars have found that customer participation can enhance the effect on customers' cognition, including perceived justice [2,25,28,39,41], perceived match [31], perceived value [41], perceived control [42], and perceived co-creation [38]. Furthermore, positive and negative emotions [43] and affect [44] have been used to explain the role of customer participation in customers' emotions.…”