Service Recovery Strategies versus Customers’ Expectations, Race for Sustainability: a Qualitative Study on Micro Brands

Abstract

Purpose of the research is to investigate service recovery strategies in case of small restaurant brands, customer perception regarding these strategies and their expectations intensely. As the study is qualitative and exploratory in nature, data were collected via in-depth interviews from duo perspective; i.e. service providers’ and customers’ perspective. The results showed that even though the managements are very cautious as regards the service recovery strategies, and customers’ complaints, but sometimes even common service recovery actions fall below the customers’ anticipations. On the other hand, restaurant those are somehow innovative with their recovery strategies; i.e. designed with a clear understanding of customers’ needs, involving customers with the recovery strategies, empowering the service staffs, emphasizing on continuous improvement and customer engagement are getting more responses in case of customer satisfaction, loyalty; and finally, ensures firms sustainability in competitive market as well.

Big trouble in little places: understanding the complexities of place micro-brands

“…Place branding was initially focused on the country level (Anholt, 2010;Hanna and Rowley, 2008;Kotler and Gertner, 2002) and tourism destination brands (Acharya and Rahman, 2016;Anholt, 2010;Bose et al, 2016). However, it is applicable to non-touristic places (Baker, 2007) such as town centres (Teller et al, 2010) involving the physical and operational attributes of a place in place branding (Ashworth and Voogd, 1990;Kotler et al, 1999). Recently, explorations of the nature and future of place branding are beyond its tourism approach (see Kavaratzis and Florek, 2021), with scant attempts to bridge the gap between theory and practice (Hankinson, 2010).…”

“…Within the city scale, micro-brands act as micro-places. Micro-brands have been explored in food products (Kumar and Babu, 2013) and small restaurants (Bin Shahriar et al , 2018), also applying a microlens of brand personality showcasing the advantages of this approach for studying specific sectors (Valette-Florence and De Barnier, 2013). However, scant references to “micro” places appear in place branding literature, such as the Qatari micro-state (Peterson, 2006) or the micro-region of Hateg in Romania (Vesa, 2017).…”

“…Places must promote themselves to attract people through marketing strategies (Anholt, 2010;Kavaratzis, 2005), which are shown to benefit from long-standing decision-making frameworks (Baker, 2007;Ripoll Gonzalez and Gale, 2023). Place marketing and branding studies are predominantly country and city scales such as Australia (Pike et al, 2010), Slovenia (de Chernatony and Ruzzier, 2013), Bogot a (Kavaratzis and Kalandides, 2015) and Dublin (Byrne and Skinner, 2007).…”

A First-Mover Lost Market Opportunity: a Case Study

“…In this series researchers tried to explain different aspects of service failure and recovery from the perspective of micro restaurant and food service brands. Their recent study (Shahriar, et al, 2018) on customers' expectations from service recovery revealed that, restaurants those have better understanding of customers' needs and those who are involving customers with the recovery process are getting more customer satisfaction and loyalty. Another case study by Shahriar, et al (2017) on small restaurant brands, showed that small restaurant brands which are emphasizing on customers' engagement to design effective service recovery policies, additionally customer engagement essentially help the service organization to reduce the cost of recovery action.…”

“…So it is also important for the service brans to design effective service recovery processes. In previous studies Shahriar et al (2018) tried to focus on the service recover design from the small brands' perspective. Findings from this researchers showed that services providers are trying to become more innovative while designing the service recovery.…”