Understanding Customer Responses to Service Failures during the COVID-19 Pandemic for Sustained Restaurant Businesses: Focusing on Guanxi

Abstract

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, restaurants worldwide, including China, have been forced to protect public health by following food safety standards and adapting to the necessary social distancing practices. Accordingly, restaurant diners who are concerned about food safety and unsure of whether it is truly safe to dine out, put more importance on the entire stages of service consumption. Restaurants must make their best efforts to minimize service failures in their service provision process and outcomes. Given that customers from different cultures are reported to evaluate service quality differently, this study was designed to investigate what actions Chinese customers who encounter service failures would take under the influence of Guanxi. Guanxi represents Chinese attitudes towards long-term individual and business relationships and ultimately involves moral obligations and mutual favors. Analyzing our structural equation model using 439 responses obtained from Chinese diners, this study determined that Chinese consumers would react differently in the service process failures and outcome failures in terms of negative word-of-mouth, direct complaints, switching intention, and revisit intention. More importantly, this study confirmed the significant moderating effects of Guanxi within the proposed relationships. Based on the study’s findings, useful implications are provided for academics and practitioners regarding sustained restaurant businesses.

Experiences of Polish Tourists Traveling for Leisure Purposes during the COVID-19 Pandemic

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Does COVID-19 impact on financial markets of China—evidence from during and pre-COVID-19 outbreak

“…There has also been a disruption in the supply chain due to widespread business shutdown (Zhang et al 2021a ; Wu and Zhu 2021 ). Supply chain disruptions and lower raw material demand due to decreased production have also reduced energy usage, hence lowering energy demand (Chaar and Bromwich 2021 ).…”

“…Emerging market economies like India, China, and Brazil were also affected by the COVID-19 pandemic’s first wave of infected individuals (Clampit et al 2021 ). The COVID-19 pandemic is one of the biggest macroeconomic shocks that affects both established and developing economies, according to Zhang et al ( 2021a , b , c , d ). Only a single market or developing markets (Tomé et al 2022 ) are considered by contemporary academics, who do not consider both developed and developing countries simultaneously.…”

Online service failure: how consumers from emerging countries react and complain

“…Previous research has already demonstrated that service failure and recovery influences consumers’ perceptions of fairness (Gelbrich and Roschk, 2011), their emotional responses (Valentini et al , 2020) and their repurchase (Kanuri and Andrews, 2019), forgiveness and retaliation intentions (Atav et al , 2021), satisfaction and word-of-mouth (WOM) (Bonifield and Cole, 2008; Hoegreve et al , 2017). Cultural values have also been the focus of extensive research, which investigated their impact on consumer perception and behavior (El Jurdi and Houjeir, 2020; Nath, 2018; Moro et al , 2020) and their relation to service failure and recovery (Matos et al , 2011; Schoefer et al , 2019; Sengupta, 2020; Zhang et al , 2021).…”