Is high recovery more effective than expected recovery in addressing service failure? — A moral judgment perspective

Abstract

In the context of two distinctive consumer categories and two different product settings this research examines the effects of recovery on recovery performance as a function of consumer moral judgment of service failure. The findings of two studies reveal that consumers' response to recovery anchors on the magnitude of recovery but these responses are adjusted according to consumers' moral judgment of service failure. Specifically, consumers react more positively toward expected recovery than high recovery and these effects are pronounced when consumers are low in moral judgment of service failure. In contrast, when consumers are high in moral judgment of service failure, although high recovery (compared with expected recovery) lessens the likelihood of negative word of mouth this effect does not transfer to repurchase tendency. Product involvement does not provide alternative explanations for the findings. The findings of this research have important and meaningful implications for business providers.

The effects of online negative word‐of‐mouth on dissatisfied customers: A frustration–aggression perspective

“…Further, the complainant–recipient model provides no grounds for dissatisfied customers to detach from other additional detrimental activities, albeit prior failure‐recovery studies proposed the opposite (Ringberg et al, ; Schoefer & Diamantopoulos, ). The growing advent of social media has empowered customers' antagonistic stance (Chen et al, ; Maxham & Netemeyer, ; Weitzl & Hutzinger, ).…”

“…The vindictive behavior of frustrated customers with online nWOM is associated with purchase reduction and decrease in trust, whereas paying others to spread nWOM, self‐usage of multiple platforms to spread nWOM and switching behavior are post‐recovery activities of aggressive customers. Although post‐recovery activities have been proposed to have a negative impact on the provider, past research yields a gap between the expected and experienced recovery (Chen et al, ).…”

“…Lastner, Folse, Mangus, and Fennell (, p. 4279) explained customers' evaluation of recovery experience and revenge tendency with appraisal theory: “emotions arise in response to appraisals, or evaluative judgments” and employee's utilization of rudeness provoked a customer's intention to seek revenge. Recently, Chen et al (, p. 2) applied expectation disconfirmation theory, defining customers' satisfaction as “a function of a combination of expectations and disconfirmation.” According to them, the link between the expectation and disconfirmation is explained by moral judgment, suggesting that customers' increased tendency to spread online nWOM came from their perception that the failure experience was immoral.…”

“…Social media present a rich platform for customers' engagement in online negative word‐of‐mouth (nWOM) as revenge against a service failure experience. Online nWOM includes customers' “public online … articulat(ion of negative) opinions about products, brands or companies” (Weitzl & Hutzinger, , p. 164); service failure arises when a provider's service performance fails to meet a customer's expectations (Chen, Ma, Bian, Zheng, & Devlin, ; Craighead, Karwan, & Miller, ; Maxham & Netemeyer, ). Marketing literature posits that online nWOM has the highest detrimental impact on a provider among post‐failure activities (Choi & Choi, ; Wang, Wu, Lin, & Wang, ).…”

Service failure and recovery strategies in the Balkans: an exploratory study

“…Smith et al, 1999). Recently, Chen et al (2018) demonstrated online customers' perception of compensation in terms of moral judgement. They report that compensation gets acknowledged in a moral discourse, revealing that customers who perceive online failure as a morally affecting act perceive compensation as the strategy used for 'punishing the business for unintended outcomes' (p. 3).…”