The Relationships Between Service Recovery And Customer Satisfaction: An Empirical Study

The importance of service recovery has drawn the attention of both service managers and researchers in the 1980s'.The valid service recoveries not only refound customer satisfaction,but also improve service quality,positive word-of-mouth and reduce customer switching behavior.It can bring more profits for enterprises.However it still stresses on how to design an effective model about customer satisfaction with service encounters involving failures and recoveries.But so far they are hardly referred to and need further research.In this study,based on more literatures and models about service recovery,we have established a model about the relationship between service recovery and customer satisfaction.With service delivering failures,we consider all factors influencing customer satisfaction.The model introduces Disconfirmation,Distributive justice,Procedural justice,Interactional justice,and the research on the relationships between recovery expectations and quality of recovery performance with disconfirmation justices and customer satisfaction.Then we develop the local scale which is suitable to use under the background of Chinese culture.Besides that,a survey has been carried out in four different cities.In this way,279 samples are collected for further analyzing.The results suggest that perceived equity and disconfirmation of expectations of service of recovery have significant impacts on satisfaction.It shows that when customers have suffered service failure,customer's evaluations of service recovery is not only based on justice,but prior expectation and quality.At same time procedural justice and interactional justice also have positive effects on perceived quality of service recovery.The empirical investigation advanced proves disconfirmation and justice are keys to customer satisfaction.However they are different notions.Justice affects disconfirmation indirectly through the quality of recovery.Moreover,for companies,Justice and expectation are important in dealing with service failures successfully.