The Effect Of Online Service Recovery On Customer Electronic Word-of-Mouth

With the development of the Internet, more and more consumers tend to find the information they need online.Electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) now has caught a lot of attention by the management and academia, and has become a hot issue in the field of research and practice.Compared with the traditional WOM, eWOM spreads widely and quickly, and is available and has a much stronger influence, which makes eWOM more and more prominent for the marketing.Although e-commerce represented by the online shopping is getting a rapid development in our country due to its advantage of convenient and economic. However, online service failures are also inevitable because service has the charecters of intangibility, heterogeneousness, simultaneity of producing and consuming, and easy-passing. Service failures can easily lead to customers’ dissatisfaction, thus leading to negative WOM and reduced customer retention. Effective service recovery can dispel service failures’ egative effect to the online service provider, change dissatisfied customers into the satisfied, thus leading to positive customer behaviors such as repurchase intentions, premium prices, positive eWOM, which benefit the service providers a lot.Based on the theory of service recovery and justice, this rsearch aims to study the effect of service recovery on consumers’ eWOM under the background of online retail. Firstly, we take a review about the concepts and theroies of service faliure and recovery, perceived fairness and customer satisfaction with service recovery(SSR), WOM and other related theroies, then a conceptual model explaining the relationship of the online service recovery quality (distributive quality, procedural quality and interactional quality), SSR and customers’ eWOM is built.Secondly,this study try to explore the potential dimensions of eWOM and build a multidimensional eWOM measurement tool based on the present achievements in order to better understand the attribute of eWOM. Then conduct the main questionnaire design and data collection, before analyzing the reability and validity of the measurement scales, we conduct an exploratory factor analysis(EFA). Then use partial least squares (PLS) of structural equation model to verify the research hypothesis. Lastly, we put forward the management implications according to the research conclusions.The main conclusions of this study are as follows:(1) Exploratory factor analysis’ results indicate that eWOM contains three potential dimensions, which are positive eWOM recommendation internal eWOM activity and external eWOM activity.(2) Under the online service recovery circumstance,customers’ perception of distributive quality, procedural quality, interactional quality and customer satisfaction with service recovery have a positive influence on customers’ positive eWOM recommendition. In addition, satisfaction with service recovery has a complete mediation effect between the impact of distributive quality and procedural qualitythe on positive eWOM recommendation; and a partial mediation effect between interactional quality’s affect on positive eWOM recommendation.(3) Each dimension of online service recovery quality has different impact on customer satisfaction with service recovery, and the effect of distributive quality on customer satisfaction is the greatest, followed by procedural quality, and interactional quality’ s influence is minimal.(4) The relationship between customer satisfaction with service recovery and customers’ nternal eWOM activities presents "U" shape, namely when customer satisfaction is very high or very low, the customer’s internal eWOM activity level is high; When customer satisfaction is in middle level, the internal eWOM activity level is low. In addition, we find no regular relationship between customer satisfaction with service recovery and the external eWOM activity.