An Empirical Study On The Impact Of Customer Relationship Quality On Service Recovery Expectations And Effects

With the concept of consumerism growing, enterprises are confronting with the stronger pressure of service than before. So, how to provide a satisfactory service quality becomes an important aim of enterprises. However, service industry has the characteristics of intangibility, inseparability, variability and perishability, which lead to the result of highly uncertainty during the management of enterprises. Once the service failure happened, customers would have negative reaction on the enterprises. If the service failure was handled inappropriately, it would not only reduce customers'satisfaction and loyalty, but also become a bad influence on word-of-mouth contrarily.Nevertheless effective service recovery could not only satisfy customers renewedly, but also improve the relationship quality between customers and enterprises. Hence, enterprises should pay much attention to the importance of service recovery. When service failure happens, the majority of customers who are dissatisfied would nourish the thought of service recovery. If service failure is much severer, customers would have a higher expectation on service recovery and a lower satisfaction after recovery. Therefore, the service recovery expectations have an important impact on customers'satisfaction of recovery. However, existing studies on service failure are mostly done from customer perceived value and the relationship between failure attribution and recovery effects, few studies focus on the service recovery expectations. So, it is necessary to explore the service recovery expectations. And this study examines the relationships among relationship quality, service failure severity, service recovery expectations, service recovery quality and satisfaction after recovery. It also researches whether service recovery quality has a moderating effect on the relationship between service recovery expectations and satisfaction after recovery. At present, such kind of study has a great meaning of initiation and academic value in the field of domestic and foreign marketing management.This study was conducted in the restaurant industry of Chongqing. 400 questionnaires were sent out and 310 effective samples were received in total. The paper makes use of factor analysis, reliability test, validity of the variables, structural equation modeling(SEM) and moderated multiple regression(MMR), and so on, to analyze the questionnaire data, and the results are found as follow:①Relationship quality has included three interrelated dimensions of trust, commitment and satisfaction in the context of service failure and recovery.②Customer commitment has a prominent negative impact on service recovery expectations.③Service failure severity has a prominent positive impact on service recovery expectations.④Customer commitment has a prominent positive impact on service recovery quality.⑤Customer trust has a prominent positive impact on service recovery quality.⑥Service recovery expectations have a prominent negative impact on satisfaction after recovery.⑦Service recovery quality has a prominent positive impact on satisfaction after recovery.⑧Service recovery quality has a moderating effect on the relationship between service recovery expectations and satisfaction after recovery.Finally, the paper gives some managerial suggestions for companies on how to implement service recovery and improve recovery effects.