An Empirical Study Of The Impact Of Conflict Communication Patterns On Service Recovery Satisfaction

Service recovery is an important management issue. Since a bad service recovery may provide further evidence that the organization is unqualified or incompetent, magnify customers’negative judgments and lead customers’transfer behavior and the intention to do harm to the organization; however, an excellent service recovery may bring the overall satisfaction after recovery equivalent to or even higher than the previous level of the initial overall satisfaction, how the service recovery can be done to largely reduce the negative effect the service failure binging customers, to restore customers’satisfaction or even enhance customers’satisfaction is a project which is imperative to analyze.In fact, service recovery cannot be done without communications between the service provider and customers. Previous research indicates that communicating and classifying the service failure is one of the four crucial steps when fulfilling service recovery. In addition, customers feel satisfied with the service recovery generally because the enterprise is able to offer complaining channel to customers and give out satisfactory responses. Particularly, when customers report to the service firm about the service failure, communication is important to them.So is it true that customer’s rage will be smoothed and he will ultimately be satisfied with the service recovery as long as the customer communicates with the service provider? We can answer this question with our real-life experience:some communications do have a positive effect on customers’satisfaction by smoothing his rage while other communications may magnify customers’anger and customers may choose not to make deals with the enterprise anymore.Why the effects of communications differ largely in the context of service recovery? Do different communication strategies exist? What role the communications played during the service recovery?Recently, the research about the effects of communication only focuses on communications regarded as one part of the interactional justice affecting customers’recovery satisfaction. Hence, to explore the effects of different communication strategies on service recovery, this paper, first of all, introduces ’conflict communication patterns’(including mutual constructive communication, demand-withdraw communication and mutual avoidance communication) which’s applied in sociology to the context of service recovery to elaborate the communication process. Secondly, this paper establishes a model of the effect of conflict communication patterns on service recovery satisfaction to explain the function of different communication patterns toward recovery satisfaction. In the end, this paper attempts to apply the research findings to managerial practices by offering appropriate service recovery communication strategies.