PurposeGiven increasing customer expectations and disturbances to product returns management, capabilities such as supply chain resilience (SCR) can complement service recovery strategies in retail supply chains. This study utilizes procedural justice theory (PJT) to conceptualize service recovery resilience as a capability that allows firms to meet customer requirements when dealing with disruptions, and empirically investigates its impact on procedural and interactional justice and customer outcomes (i.e. satisfaction and loyalty) in the context of product replacement.Design/methodology/approachThis research employs two scenario-based experiments using a sample of 368 customers to explore the outcomes associated with service recovery resilience.FindingsThe investigation shows more satisfied and loyal customers when a retail supply chain can overcome service recovery challenges through SCR. The study shows that customers evaluate not only the process itself, but also their interactions with the retailer. Specifically, procedural justice and interactional justice have a significant influence on these relationships.Originality/valueThis study proposes service recovery resilience as a concept that bridges service recovery theory with supply chain strategy in the unique context of product replacement. Further, this study also notes how information enhances customer satisfaction with the retailer's effort to address disturbances in the recovery process. Finally, this study informs managers on the capabilities needed to face new customers' needs.

With the growth of e‐commerce and associated home deliveries, understanding the role of drivers in shaping the customer experience in last‐mile delivery is now more crucial than ever. Delivery drivers increasingly act as retailers' frontline employees and are thus instrumental in developing pseudorelationships between customers and retailers. Industry surveys, however, reveal that drivers admit to engaging in unprofessional behaviors with customers and often refuse to address customers' requests beyond package delivery. Following a middle‐range theorizing approach and leveraging Cognitive Appraisal Theory, we investigate how two negative driver behaviors, inappropriate behavior and inflexibility, impact customer satisfaction and repurchase intentions. We also examine the moderating effect of driver affiliation, private versus outsourced, in altering the magnitude of customer responses. Results from a scenario‐based experiment indicate that while the negative effects of driver inappropriate behavior on customer outcomes are mediated by anger, the effects of driver inflexibility are mediated by sadness. Moreover, the negative effect of driver inflexibility on customer outcomes is weaker for outsourced logistics than for private fleet drivers. In turn, driver inappropriate behavior exhibits similar negative effects on customer outcomes for both driver affiliations. These findings offer important insights for last‐mile delivery strategy and operations research and practice.

Airlines constantly seek to attenuate the negative impacts of operational service failures, namely arrival delays, mishandled baggage, and involuntary denied boarding, on customer satisfaction. Our study examines the roles of two management decisions—advertising expenses and flight personnel salaries—in shaping customer satisfaction via ex-ante expectations and the actual service experience, respectively. Drawing from expectancy disconfirmation theory (EDT) and the airline service quality literature, we investigate the effectiveness of these two expenses in moderating the impact of service failures on customer satisfaction. We test our hypotheses with a panel dataset created by merging data on 15,979 online airline ratings, operational service failures, and financial and traffic performance from three data sources for the 2010–19 period. We find that both arrival delays and involuntary denied boarding negatively affect customer satisfaction. In addition we find that while advertising positively impacts customer satisfaction, it strengthens the negative effect of involuntary denied boarding on customer satisfaction. However, increasing flight personnel salaries helps mitigate this negative effect through a positive and empathic service experience. These findings underscore the importance of managing passenger expectations about the service and enhancing the inflight experience as to ameliorate the negative effects of operational failures on customer satisfaction.

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