Service Recovery and Customer Satisfaction

Résumé du document

It is a well known fact that mistakes are a critical part of every service. In services, often performed in the customer's presence, errors are inevitable. While it may not be possible to eliminate mistakes altogether, companies can certainly learn to recover from their mistakes. Such recovery attempts have been found to contribute towards enhancing customer loyalty. A good recovery can turn angry, frustrated customers into loyal ones. Various theories have been disseminated in the past to analyze how service recovery affects customer satisfaction, customer loyalty and customer's response to service failures. One of these is the Attribution Theory, which provides a basis for understanding how consumers respond to service failures (Folkes, 1984). Attribution theory predicts that the perceived reason for a service failure influences the level of consumer satisfaction and that the service failure itself is not the only factor to influence consumer's evaluation of the service; but that the reason for the failure itself is also a contributing factor.

Extraits

[...] (Prasongsukarn and Patterson). Furthermore this cultural dimension shows that consumers from individualist cultures value being shown that the organisation cares about them as person whilst too personal concern for a consumer from a collectivist background may cause that consumer to feel discomfort and embarrassment (Becker 2005). Uncertainty avoidance High uncertainty avoidance is typical of eastern cultures and characterised by the need for predictability including written rules and procedures (Prasongsukarn and Patterson 2001). Obviously it can be expected that consumers from cultures that are high in uncertainty avoidance to be hesitant to make complaints, particularly if the complaint procedure isn't known. [...]

[...] Various theories have been disseminated in the past to better analyse how service recovery affects customer satisfaction, customer loyalty and customer's response to service failures. One of these is the Attribution Theory, which provides a basis for understanding how consumers respond to service failures (Folkes,1984). Attribution theory predicts that the perceived reason for a service failure influences the level of consumer satisfaction and thus that the service failure itself is not the only factor to influence consumer's evaluation of the service; but that the reason for the failure itself is also a contributing factor. [...]

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[...] Stability (is the service failure likely to occur often?) if the customer thinks that this is a one-off incident, his level of dissatisfaction with the service might be limited 2. Controllability -could the service failure have been avoided? 3. Locus (is the service failure the fault of the consumer or the service provider?) If the customer realizes that a service failure is due to his or her own fault, then he or she would be less upset than if the service provider is perceived to be at fault for the service failure. [...]

[...] In the growing global economy service providers have became aware that cultural values are not universal and naturally this affects business strategies. In the case of service recovery which proposes customer satisfaction as its ultimate goal, it is important to understand the core values customer's hold (Becker 2000) as influenced by cultural dimensions such as power distance, uncertainty avoidance and individualist or collectivist values. Power distance The Western and eastern world are seen as polar opposites in this dimension of culture with eastern cultures scoring among the highest on the power distance scale and western cultures scoring very low. [...]