An Empirical Study Of Service Recovery On Service Failure Attributions, Emotions And Complaints Of Customer

Due to some characteristics of service, such as intangibility, heterogeneity,inseparability of production and consumption, perishability and so on, service failures areinevitable. Suffered service failures, consumers would firstly on the reason of servicesfailures with subjective judgement, resulting in negative emotions and complaints. Afterservice failures happen, the enterprise takes measures to compensate consumers, but thedifferent selections of service recovery will impact the remedial effect. In the existingacademic research, there are few studies of service recovery which is conducted with themanner and timing together, and investigate the impact on service failure attributions,consumer emotions and complaints.Based on above, on the basis of studying the relevant documents and deep interviews,the initial theoretical model was constructed for exploring the impact of service recoveryon service failure attributions, emotions and complaints of customer.In the model, according to the manner and timing, the service recovery is partitionedinto proactive immediate recovery, proactive recovery, reactive immediate recovery,reactive recovery, and a detailed study of different recovery on consumer service failureattributions, emotions and complaints, as well as the relationships between customeremotions and complaints. According to the results of previous studies, visited thecustomers who experienced service failure recovery, and the marketing experts, thequestionnaire was designed, and selected the scenario simulation (with hotel service forexample) for data collection. We distributed360questionnaires in Chongqing, and321questionnaires were valid. In order to test scale reliability, validity and hypotheses, severalmethods were used, for example, descriptive analysis, variance analysis, and structuralequation modeling analysis. Finally, according to data analysis, the forward suggestionsare proposed for enterprises.Several main contributions of the study are following:①According to the results of previous studies, the service recovery is partitionedinto proactive immediate recovery, proactive recovery, reactive immediate recovery,reactive recovery, and which provide a new approach for the follow-up study of servicerecovery.②The relationship between service failure attributions, customer negative emotionsand complaints, are demonstrated. The results show that different service failure attributions have significant effects on customer negative emotions and complaints.③Based on the above conclusions, we proposed suggestions to enterprises abouthow to take service recovery to effectively improve the service quality and reduce thenumber of complaints, while service failure happens.