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Service failures represent temporary or permanent interruptions of the customer's regular service experience. Although the literature identifies an extensive set of organizational alternatives for recovering from service failures, researchers have approached these responses as discrete organizational actions that are loosely connected to the dynamic nature of the recovery experience. In this paper, we address this shortcoming by introducing the idea of the service recovery journey (SRJ). We first conceptualize the SRJ as the outcome of a service failure that is composed of three phases: pre-recovery, recovery, and post-recovery. We then synthesize the organizational responses to service failures reported in 230 journal articles and integrate them with the novel SRJ perspective. Thereafter, we provide an extensive set of questions for future research that will expand our knowledge about the pre-recovery, recovery, and post-recovery phases, and address the interaction between the customer's regular journey and the SRJ. Finally, we outline six considerations for recovery research seeking to affect business practice and discuss the managerial implications of adopting an SRJ perspective.

When they experience service failures, customers look for causes. They seek to understand whether the service firm could have prevented the failure (controllability attribution) and whether the cause of the failure is temporary or constant over time (stability attribution). To understand such attributions, we perform a meta-analysis. We find that causal attributions are related to emotional and cognitive reactions in several ways. First, controllability attributions elicit stronger negative emotions than do stability attributions. Second, controllability attributions directly affect only transaction-specific satisfaction, whereas stability attributions directly affect customers’ transaction-specific and overall satisfaction. Third, both attributions affect loyalty and negative word of mouth through negative emotions, overall satisfaction, and transaction-specific satisfaction. Finally, contextual (i.e., cultural values), methodological (i.e., type of failure), and measurement factors (i.e., measurement scale) partly explain studywise variation in the effects of attributions on customer outcomes. We recommend that companies manage reactions to service failure thrice: before customers formulate attributional beliefs, using fast and accurate communication; when the attributional beliefs are formed, offering employee assistance and compensations; and well after the attributional beliefs are established, providing feedback on process improvements by the company.

Service recovery captures the organizational actions of seeking and dealing with a failure in the service delivery. Although many studies have examined the outcomes of organizational efforts in managing service recovery, there is a lack of a comprehensive framework embracing the focal constructs, the causal relationships, the interdisciplinarity, and the levels of theory in service recovery. In this paper we synthesize theoretical and empirical studies examining the operations, marketing, and human resources management views on service recovery, offering three contributions to the literature. First, we develop an interdisciplinary and multilevel framework linking organizational investments in service recovery to organizational, employee, and customer outcomes, within and across levels of theory. Second, we integrate conceptual and empirical propositions from previously separate research. Third, we offer scholars a research agenda highlighting several issues that are in need of interdisciplinary research on service recovery. . The effect of management commitment to service quality on employees' affective and performance outcomes.

Co-creating service recovery after service failure:The role of brand equity! Abstract Co-creating service recoveries with customers has recently appeared as a new perspective in service research. Prior research demonstrates the effectiveness of co-created recovery strategies in driving customer outcomes, and outlines when co-creating a service recovery is recommended. This paper complements prior research not only by demonstrating the mediating role of outcome favorability in the relationship between co-created service recovery and customer outcomes, but also by showing whether organizations with different levels of brand equity benefit equally from co-creating service recovery with their customers.The results of two experiments show that co-creating a service recovery makes customers believe they received the most favorable solution for the service failure, which in turn influences satisfaction with service recovery and repurchase intentions. In addition, cocreating a service recovery is recommended for organizations with low levels of brand equity, but not for organizations with high levels of brand equity.

As soon as we've published an article, the version of the article that has been accepted for publication, the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) can be used for a variety of noncommercial scholarly purposes, subject to full attribution. An author may deposit and use their AAM (aka post-print) http://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/openaccess/oa_policies.htm Business Model Innovation and Value-creation: The Triadic Way Acknowledgments We thank the editor of Journal of Service Management and Prof Janet McColl-Kennedy for taking the initiative and hosting the Brisbane Thought leader conference that gave birth to this research. We also want to thank two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.

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Complaint management should not be restricted to a firm’s efforts to fix the problem and restore customer satisfaction after a service failure (i.e., customer recovery [CR]). Rather, firms should learn from customer complaints and improve their processes to prevent similar failures (i.e., process recovery [PR]). PR communication, or the feedback to customers that describes how an organization has executed complaint-based process improvements, thus may be critical. Four studies investigate the impact of PR communication on customer outcomes for customers (1) who experienced a failure, complained, and received satisfactory CR; (2) who experienced a failure, complained, and received unsatisfactory CR; (3) who experienced a failure but did not complain; and (4) who did not experience a failure. PR communication positively affects customers' overall satisfaction, repurchase intentions, and word-of-mouth intentions through higher perceptions of the firm’s relationship investment and overall justice. In addition, such communication is most effective for the second and third types of customers; the effects for the first and fourth types are less pronounced. Managers who want to maximize the return on their complaint-handling efforts should communicate process recoveries to customers.