Study On Formation Mechanism Of Customer Satisfaction Of Service Recovery

Customer satisfaction is the foundation of survival and development for service providers. Although all marketers strive to retain their customers through satisfaction, service failure is inevitable owing to specialities of service, which will bring about disaster to service providers.Service failure has its rationality, but dissatisfied customers are not inevitable. Through excellent service recovery, service providers can build customer recovery satisfaction. Facing service failure, customers have several choices. Direct complaint is just one of the choices and contributes to both of the benefits of customers and service providers. Complaining customers can receive monetary compensation, while service providers can grasp the second opportunity to build customer satisfaction and retain customers. Service recovery has magnification effect, i.e. recovery paradox and double deviation, excellent recovery will exhibit enhanced levels of recovery satisfaction that would not have been attained if customers had not had a service/failure experience, and inadequate recovery efforts represent a double deviation from the expectations that customers hold for service recovery, resulting in magnification of the negative evaluation. Therefore, service recovery and customer recovery satisfaction are of great significance for service providers.In reality, complaining customers are tip of iceberg of dissatisfied customers, most service providers can't build customer recovery satisfaction through service recovery, even customer recovery satisfaction dropped indeed.Extant literatures hold both of perceived justice and recovery expectation disconfirmation as two coordinate and important antecedents of customer recovery satisfaction, recovery expectation disconfirmation complements perceived justice in the prediction of customer recovery satisfaction but is the lesser of the two determinants. Perceived justice consists of three dimensions, researchers have studied which dimension of perceived justice has the greatest effect on customer recovery satisfaction but there is no consistent even contradictory conclusion.This research investigates the formation mechanism of customer recovery satisfaction on the basis of existing research results, including how perceived justice and expectation disconfirmation form customer recovery satisfaction and whether situational factors have moderating effect on the relative weights of perceived justice dimensions in the formation of customer recovery satisfaction. The research takes restaurant industry as example and uses a simulated scenarios design. Before extensive test, marketers of local well-known restaurant accepted our semi-structured deep interview and 50 customers conducted field pretest. The research chooses university students as respondents and gets 1491 valid questionnaires and includes two studies.In accordance with existing results, study 1 puts forward the customer recovery satisfaction model which consists of two stages and perceived justice plays a role of mediation variable. In the first stage, perceived justice dimensions are formed through recovery expectation disconfirmation, and in the second stage, the model explains the effects of perceived justice dimensions on customer recovery satisfaction with justice theory. Study 1 fits the customer recovery satisfaction model by SEM and tests the hypotheses by path analysis, the results show that the model has good fitness,69% of variances of customer recovery satisfaction can be explained by the model and 11 of 12 hypotheses are supported. Moreover, the weight of outcome justice on customer recovery satisfaction is much higher than that of process justice. Customers form perceived justice of service recovery through recovery expectation disconfirmation and perceived justice influences customer recovery satisfaction directly.Study 2 discusses whether there is difference in the relative influence of perceived justice dimensions on customer recovery satisfaction in different service failure scenarios, i.e. the moderating effect of situational factors. The simulated scenarios in study 2 involve a 2×2 between-subjects design, in which type of failure (outcome versus process) and magnitude of failure (serious versus mild) are manipulated. Study 2 investigates whether the influence of perceived justice dimensions to be different in different service failure scenarios (mild service failure versus serious service failure and process service failure versus outcome service failure), the results show there is moderating effect of service failure situational factors on the influence of perceived justice dimensions on customer recovery satisfaction. The influence of outcome justice on customer recovery satisfaction in mild or outcome service failure scenarios is stronger than that in serious or process service failure scenarios, the influence of process justice on customer recovery satisfaction in process or serious service failure scenarios is stronger than that in outcome or mild service failure scenarios. The relative weights of perceived justice dimensions to customer recovery satisfaction are not stable, situational factors have moderating effect on them.The research results suggest that service providers still have initiatives in customer recovery satisfaction and there is possibility for them to build customer recovery satisfaction. Monetary compensation is the most effective recovery strategy. Service providers should bring into the enhancement play of process justice to achieve higher customer recovery satisfaction by taking service failure scenarios into account.