Are Gender and Appearance Important? Exploring the Relationship between Recovery Type and Post-recovery Satisfaction

Abstract

Since service failure is inevitable in the service industry, how to remedy the failure and maintain customer satisfaction has become an important management issue for enterprises in marketing. This study took gender and physical attractiveness as moderators, hoping to find a mechanism that is more conducive to improving the effectiveness of failure recovery from the perspective of these two variables. In this study, experimental design was used to design a total of 16 experimental scenarios for model verification. The experiment was conducted on a network platform, and a total of 800 valid experimental samples were completed. The study found that for tangible compensation, female service personnel and physical attractiveness are helpful to improve post-recovery satisfaction. In addition, the opposite sex combination of customers and service personnel will produce better remedial effect than the heterosexual combination. Finally, it is also verified that physical attractiveness is an important moderator. The physical attractiveness of the service personnel enables the recovery type and gender combination to have more positive influence on post-recovery satisfaction, thus it plays an important role in failure recovery strategy. Managerial implications for marketing manager of the service industry as well as directions for future research are also discussed.

A Discussion on Changes in Consumer Behaviors and Marketing Coping Strategies during the Pandemic Era – A Case Study of the Hotel Industry and Catering Industry

“…Based on this feature, service providers and consumers must meet face-to-face to become co-manufacturers of the service. In terms of service exposure, both the catering industry and the hotel industry belong to high exposure industries (Tsao, 2018;Tsao and Jhang, 2019). Therefore, social distancing became the new norm during the pandemic, which has even remained post-pandemic, and such new lifestyle changes and values are bound to have a significant impact on the hotel and catering industries.…”

How to Respond to Customer Complaints -from the Perspective of Argument Strength

“…The above findings suggest that the company immediately make substantial remedies when the service failure occurs: provide financial value-added methods for atonement such as coupons, discounts, refunds, product replacement or re-service, etc. (Tsao & Jhang, 2019). Moreover, managers with higher ranks can be invited to come forward to understand and remedy related incidents.…”

“…The banking and financial industry must rely on a large number of people to provide various services. Service failures are inevitable in such an industry, especially one with high personal contact (Tsao & Jhang, 2019). If friction between service personnel and consumers results in negative word-of-mouth (WOM), it will inevitably cause consumers to have a negative perception of the company and affect their purchase decisions.…”

How Can Service Failures Be Recovered? Start with Star Ratings, Personnel Rank, and Failure Severity

“…Due to the characteristics of intangibility, inseparability, variability, and perishability of the service industry, coupled with customer participation in the service delivery process, service failures are unavoidable (Tsao, Hsieh, Ye, & Tsai, 2014;Tsao & Jhang, 2019). Since service failures cannot be avoided, a good service recovery mechanism has become an important management mechanism to retain customers and avoid customer defection (Tsao, 2018).…”

“…In the past, most related studies only discussed how service quality affects customer satisfaction, or the remedial effect was explored by the attractiveness and gender of service personnel, as based on the perceived justice theory (Tsao & Jhang, 2019). There are few researches on the three constructs of hotel rating, personnel rank, and service failure severity to explore the relationship between them, post-recovery satisfaction, and corporate image.…”