The Effects of Apologies for Service Failures in the Global Online Retail

ABSTRACT

Virtually all sources on service recovery stress the importance of offering an apology to complaining customers. To date, however, our understanding of who should offer the apology and how to offer the apology is still limited. Taking a cross-cultural perspective, Study 1 shows that Eastern customers attach more value to a manager (vis-à-vis a frontline employee) offering an apology than Western customers in an offline retailing context, but not in an online retailing context. In an online setting, Study 2 further extends these insights by showing that the status of service personnel matters for Eastern customers, but only if the apology is provided publicly on social media and not if the apology is provided online privately. Global e-commerce managers can benefit from these findings when developing their service recovery strategies. By demonstrating that recovery strategies that are proposed and tested in offline settings are non transferrable to online settings, this article provides a clearer understanding of service recovery across online and offline channels. Based on face theory, this research highlights the public versus private nature of an apology in a global online retailing context, thus contributing to the emerging research in online service recovery.

KEY WORDS AND PHRASES:

• E-tail
• global e-commerce
• online retail
• perceived justice
• service apology
• service failure
• service recovery

Notes

¹ We nevertheless also provide the results on the other dimensions of justice.

² The percentage of participants who failed to remember whether the scenario concerned online or offline shopping (Study 1) or whether they received an apology on Twitter publicly or privately (Study 2) did not differ between conditions (p_min = .66).

³ We also checked and found that all results hold at the country level.

⁴ We thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sanchayan Sengupta

SANCHAYAN SENGUPTA ([email protected], corresponding author) is an assistant professor of marketing at ESSCA School of Management, France. His research interests are in services marketing, complaint management and cross-cultural research. His work has appeared in several conference proceedings, including Academy of Marketing Science Annual Conference, 2016.

Daniel Ray

DANIEL RAY ([email protected]) is a professor of marketing and director of the Customer Equity Institute at Grenoble Ecole de Management. He received his Ph.D. in marketing from the University of Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne. Prior to entering academia, he worked on senior levels in consulting and market research firms such as TNS-Sofres and EY. His research deals with customer satisfaction and technological innovation in marketing. His work has appeared in Management, Recherche et Applications en Marketing, and Decisions Marketing. He is the author of two books that have received three awards.

Olivier Trendel

OLIVIER TRENDEL ([email protected]) is an associate professor of marketing at Grenoble Ecole de Management in France. He received his Ph.D. in marketing from the University of Grenoble. His main areas of research concern the study of automatic mechanisms of information processing (i.e., implicit cognition), mechanisms that drive spontaneous beliefs and behaviors. The domains of applications include communication effectiveness, food consumption, and relational marketing. His research has been published in Appetite, Food Quality and Preference, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Marketing Research, and Recherche et Applications en Marketing. He serves on the editorial board of Recherche et Applications en Marketing.

Yves Van Vaerenbergh

+YVES VAN VAERENBERGH ([email protected]) is an assistant professor of marketing at the KU Leuven, Belgium. He received his Ph.D. in applied economics from the Center for Service Intelligence at Ghent University. His research interests include service issues such as service failures, service recovery, and pricing innovations. His publications have appeared in Academy of Management Perspectives, Journal of Service Research, and Journal of Business Research, among others. He serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Service Research, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Service Management, and Journal of Service Theory and Practice.