Rethinking Service Recovery Strategies

Abstract

Researchers and practitioners have invested heavily in identifying effective complaint management strategies. However, most of the strategies identified to date occur only after a service failure occurs. This article proposes that antecedent states such as an ongoing rapport with service employees can also provide service recovery benefits. Four independent studies test this approach and indicate that an existing rapport between the customer and service provider results in increased postfailure customer satisfaction, increased repatronage intentions, and decreased negative word of mouth. Yet results for complaint intentions suggest that rapport does not increase the propensity for customers to complain about poor service. These results are discussed in terms of their implications for research and practice.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 310 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.