Responding to negative reviews? The interplay of management response strategy and service failure type

ABSTRACT

Restaurants often struggle with their approach to respond to service failure online. In this scenario-based experiment, the researchers study the effectiveness of management response types along with two overarching types of service failure concerning three outcomes. Some of the significant results are that it is not important whether the restaurant offers compensation or apology; as long as management responds to negative reviews, company’s reputation management works and customers are willing to shop from the restaurant. However, interestingly, with respect to customers’ recovery satisfaction, the findings underscored that companies should either not respond at all or should compensate dissatisfied customers instead of only writing an apology. Concerning the simultaneous existence of the technical and functional dimensions of a service failure regarding customers’ recovery satisfaction and their willingness to purchase from the restaurant, the findings underlined the centrality of technical dimension that is in contradiction with prior research findings. A discussion on findings is presented along with recommendations for future research.

餐馆往往难以应对在线服务故障。在这个基于场景的实验中, 研究人员研究了管理响应类型的有效性, 以及与三种结果相关的两种主要服务失败类型. 一些重要的结果是, 餐厅是否提供赔偿或道歉并不重要; 只要管理层对负面评论做出回应, 公司的声誉管理就起作用, 顾客愿意在餐厅购物. 然而, 有趣的是, 关于客户的恢复满意度, 调查结果强调, 公司要么根本不应作出回应, 要么应赔偿不满意的客户, 而不是仅仅写一封道歉信. 关于服务失败的技术层面和功能层面同时存在, 涉及客户的恢复满意度和他们从餐厅购买的意愿, 研究结果强调了技术层面的中心性, 这与先前的研究结果相矛盾. 对研究结果进行了讨论, 并对未来的研究提出了建议.

KEYWORDS:

• Service failure
• negative reviews
• purchase intention
• management response
• service recovery

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).