Research On Service Recovery Effect From Customer's Attribution And Relationship Quality

Because of the inseparability in service production and consumption service failure is inevitable; it is a major reason of customer defection in service area. The companies carry out service recovery actively or inactively to maintain customer's satisfaction after service failure. Effective service recovery will turn dissatisfactory customer into loyal customer, and make them more satisfactory than that kind of customer who never encounter service failure. Therefore, service recovery is becoming a focus in service marketing and management research. Based on the reviews of abundant literature, the thesis summarizes the research production home and abroad. Meanwhile, the model and hypotheses are put forward.This research studies on how customer's attribution and relationship quality affect customer satisfaction and customer's behavior intention through customer's expectation of service recovery. The effect of relationship quality exists in service failure and service recovery, but the viewpoints of academia are different about whether the effect of relationship quality is positive or negative on service recovery effect. The author assumes that not only customer's relationship quality but also customer's relationship phase affects customer recovery expectation. This study proves that customer's relationship quality and customer's relationship phase affect customer recovery expectation synchronously, at the same time, the partial effect of relationship quality and customer's relationship phase on customer's attribution is proved.A lot of domestic and overseas researches proved that successful service recovery makes the customers more satisfactory than before they encounter service failure. But the former researches just focus on the change of the same or different customers' satisfaction in the same enterprise when they encounter service failure and recovery. In fact, customers have many choices. If the customers have to make a consumption decision again after they encounter service failure and recovery, they consider not only their satisfaction but also other enterprises. This paper studies on customers' behavior intention in the case of comparing one company in which customers experience service failure and recovery with another company in which customers never experience service failure, which company they will spread positive word-of-mouth about and repurchase from, providing a new perspective for study of service recovery. Because the different cognitions of different firms may affect customer's choice, this paper assumes that the cognitions of the two comparative corporations are the same in the customer's viewpoint. The result shows that not only customer satisfaction but also customer's perceived failure severity affects customer's behavior intention.This paper collects research data through questionnaires investigating to restaurants. SPSS and LISREL are adopted to do the reliability and validity analysis, factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, regression analysis, variance analysis and structural equation model analysis to verify the model and hypotheses.The conclusions are following as:(1) Customer's attribution has effect on customer's service recovery expectation.(2) Customer's relationship quality and relationship phase have effect on customer's service recovery expectation.(3) Customer's relationship quality and relationship phase have effect on customer's attribution partly.(4) There is negative correlation between customer's service recovery expectation and customer satisfaction.(5) There is positive correlation between customer satisfaction and customer's behavior intention.(6) There is negative correlation between customer's perceived failure severity and customer's behavior intention.