The Service Recovery Journey: Conceptualization, Integration, and Directions for Future Research

Abstract

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.

Neuroscience in service research: an overview and discussion of its possibilities

“…Few researchers applied neuro-tools to the understanding of service research problems (e.g., Boshoff, 2012Boshoff, , 2017Huneke et al, 2015). In this section of the paper, we discuss a nonexhaustive list of service research topics where neuro-insights may be particularly useful, building on recent (service) research agendas (e.g., Bolton et al, 2018;De Keyser et al, 2019;Lemon and Verhoef, 2016;Ostrom et al, 2015;Van Vaerenbergh et al, 2019;Voorhees et al, 2017;Wirtz et al, 2018).…”

“…Emotional contagion is not limited to human interaction only but is also relevant to interactions with service robots (Barsade et al, 2018). Research on service robots is still in a nascent stage (De Keyser et al, 2019;Wirtz et al, 2018), hence the service domain is in a privileged position to contribute to the general emotional contagion-technology literature.…”

“…Cognitive load relates to the total amount of mental activity imposed on working memory resources (cf. cognitive load theory; e.g., Choi et al, 2014;Sweller, 2011), and may, for instance, be considered in service research looking at co-creation and the adoption of new technologies (De Keyser et al, 2019). For example, as customers often have to assemble products themselves, it could be interesting to understand the cognitive load of customers during this self-assembly (e.g., reading instructions, building, working together) and how this translates to satisfaction or even the successful finishing of the customer's task.…”

“…In the service field, however, we have only found a few initial neuroscience applications (e.g., Boshoff, 2012Boshoff, , 2017Huneke et al, 2015). Recently, several calls have been launched to fuse service research with neuroscientific insights (e.g., De Keyser et al, 2015;Lemon and Verhoef, 2016;Van Vaerenbergh et al, 2019). Other papers call for employing more objective data to measure actual responses, thereby suggesting neuroscientific methods as one potential way forward (e.g., Kumar et al, 2013;Morales et al, 2017).…”

Editorial – Ten Trends Shaping the Future of Marketing: Considerations for the Academics

“…Given the complexity of the contemporary setting, other major issues, such as service experience and customer's response on service delivery (Van Vaerenbergh, Varga, De Keyser & Orsingher, 2018;Wan & Wyer, 2018) as well as green branding and green marketing (Papista & Dimitriadis, 2019;Wu, Wei, Tseng & Cheng, 2018) require continual investigation. Having said that, specific topics such as pop-up retail (Lunardo & Mouangue, 2019;Spitzkat & Fuentes, 2019), shopping cart abandonment (Huang, Korfiatis & Chang, 2018), selling cues (Das, Mukherjee & Smith, 2018;Yu, Hudders & Cauberghe, 2018), ambient scents (Girard, Lichters, Sarstedt & Biswas, 2019) as well as the use of chatbots and robots in marketing activities (Chung, Ko, Joung & Kim, 2018;Kim, Schmitt & Thalmann, 2019;Murphy, Gretzel & Pesonen, 2019;Mende, Scott, van Doorn, Grewal & Shanks, 2019) are as important because these are what organizations and customers are experiencing today.…”