The effect of service failure types and service recovery on customer satisfaction: a mental accounting perspective

Abstract

Service failure recoveries play an important role in the service process. Previous research on service recovery has focused on the development of classification schemes, such as service failure types (e.g. outcome- or process-related failure), service recovery attributes (e.g. psychological or tangible recovery), and failure magnitude. Few studies in the literature have developed a theory-driven model of customer satisfaction that considers whether different types of service failure warrant different types of service recovery. This article, which reports the results of two studies, draws on mental accounting theory to examine the effect of the relationship between service failure and service recovery on customer satisfaction. The results of Study 1 show that customer satisfaction is greater when service recovery efforts truly make up for what customers have lost and that prior experience of service failure has a significant influence on the effectiveness of those efforts. The results of Study 2 indicate that the magnitude of a service failure also has an impact on the effectiveness of service recovery efforts.

Keywords:

• services
• service failures
• service recoveries
• mental accounting theory
• customer satisfaction

Notes

To ensure the representativeness of the student sample, a non-student sample comprising 62 men and 82 women with an average age of 33.7 was also recruited. ANOVA showed there to be no significant differences among the four groups (FA-1 (1, 77) = 1.527, p = 0.220 > 0.1; FA-2 (1, 78) = 0.581, p = 0.448 > 0.1; FA-3 (1, 81) = 3.280, p = 0.074 > 0.05; FA-4 (1, 80) = 2.606, p = 0.110 > 0.1). The student sample was thus judged as representative.