Recovering service failure through resource integration

Abstract

Customers and employees can co-create a resolution following a service failure through integrating their resources. Their activities and interactions during resource-integration shape the customers' service recovery experiences. Prior research overlooks resource integration between all involved actors in a co-created service recovery process. This research details the process with two empirical studies. Study 1 is a qualitative analysis of narratives of service recovery experiences; Study 2 is a quantitative assessment of scenario-based survey data. The results show that a favourable service recovery experience is resulted from integrating all involved actors' resources in a mutually beneficial manner. Three key resources are financial compensation, service skills including communication and timing. Our findings indicate that co-created service recovery fails in the absence of just one resource or mismatches in their integration. The combined studies reveal that customers use their justice perceptions to assess activities and interactions for resource integration in service recovery.

Keywords:

• service recovery
• value co-creation
• resource integration
• justice theory