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Journal of Management and Business Research, 2005
22（ 4 ）：449-465
DOI： 10.6504/JOM.2005.22.04.03 |
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| A Study of Second time Satisfaction from the Service Recovery |
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Providing high service quality and customer value will not only affect directly the space of survival in a competitive market, but also be the key factor of success in winning over customers. Although ”do right on the first time” is the first rule of productivity and service quality, sometimes, due to uncontrollable factors from outside organization, an enterprise should not ignore repeated occurrences of service failure. Prior researches concerned service failure and recovery strategy are plentiful (Best and Andreasen, 1976; Bolfing, 1989; Blodgett et al., 1993; Johnstons, 1995; Johnston and Hewa, 1997; Hoffman, Kelley and Rotalsky, 1995; Du, 2000, Liu et al., 2001; Cheng, 1997, 2002). The majority attached great importance to the recovery and effectiveness of service failure. However, pay less attention to how to recover again if recovery was failed to meet a customer's expectation.
Bitner, Booms and Tetrearlt (1990) indicated that the reason why customer not satisfy are inappropriate or inopportune recovery efforts from organization (that means incapability to offer effective recovery), so customer's negative evaluation may be enlarged to product a ”double deviation”. Shoemaker (1996) emphasized that cognitive script may operationalize customer's expectation. Therefore, we considered that an effective service recovery strategy might also show the recovery expectation by means of cognitive script. After service failure, if service recovery efforts are developed according to the script (the disconfirmation script which meets customer's expectancy), the positive satisfaction or service quality will form. Otherwise, the customer may feel dissatisfaction (Alford, 1993, 1998).
Based on the assumption of double deviation, this study tried to explore that after service and recovery failure, how a company takes the effective recovery strategy. We thought that when a consumer faced the different severity of service failure, and if we could obtain positive (negative) disconfirmed service recovery script from customers, then we could further to understand the influence of effectiveness of service recovery on recovery performance, loyalty, and repurchase intention.. So, the purpose of this study explores the relationship between the severity of service failure and intensity of complaints, as well as hope to understand the positive (negative) recovery expectation through customer's cognitive script, and further to verify the variations of satisfaction before and after in the different disconfirmed recovery efforts.
A repeated measure by two-stage experiment was used to test the hypotheses. The first stage of research tried to find the relationship between complaint behaviors and failure severity, and used cognitive script analysis to operate for service recovery expectations. The second study verified impact of difference expectation of service recovery by cognitive script on perceptive reflection from participants. Both studies adopted the same method that participants viewed a videotape before they filled in questionnaires. It was necessary to make sure that all subjects know the service encounter. Restaurant service satisfied this objective.
Since the experiment was conducted in two-stages (That is, each participant has to consistently fill in two-stage questionnaires.) For smoothly proceeding, the research gave up method of laboratory and replaced with soliciting volunteer participants on internet that we posted ”solicit test participants” article on BBS, registered web page (Yam, Pchome Online, and Gais) and sent out many e-mails. Besides, in order to raise return rate, we provided incentives giving anyone who completed two-stage questionnaires prize. There are almost 20% participants did not continue to fill in the second-stage questionnaires, in order to examine distribution of two-sample frame, we took t-test the materials of second-stage samples for statistic examination. The results showed that the ratio of sample materials had no significance. The research design was to conduct front-and-rear paired experiments of two studies and obtained 232 and 189 samples respectively.
The result showed that the higher severity of service failure, the more unsatisfactory customer is and the stronger the intensity of complaint is. Secondly, the author used the rank-order measure to elaborate the scripts. The rank-order measure does tap into two of the theoretical qualities of scripts：(1) that scripts consist of a core set of actions and (2) that these actions are temporally arranged (Aford, 1998). The author sorted out 10 expected recovery efforts (positive disconfirmed script), and 5 unexpected recovery measures (negative disconfirmed scripts) according to the extraction standards (the ratio must be over 40%) set by John and Whitney (1982). The service recovery expectation of the customers will affect the customer satisfaction, as well as the recovery response also affects customer's second time satisfaction.
Finally, The results show that different recovery scripts (positive disconfirmed vs. negative disconfirmed) has significantly differences in the 2(superscript nd) satisfaction, recovery performance, repurchase intention and negative WOM. The gap of recovery performance is the widest (2.23), followed by negative WOM” (2.0) and repurchase intention (1.82). If we view from variance percentage, two different recovery measures have the greatest impact on recovery performance (159.29%), and are very helpful to lower negative WOM (-95%). They proved that the impact of different disconfirmed recovery script on perceptive reflection after recovery was significant.
Listening to the voice of customer is absolutely an excellent opportunity for pushing enterprise forward. A customer's complain always means the customer is still willing to keep the relationship with the service provider. So how to let unhappy customers easy to complain the service failure is important. Therefore, how to deal with complaints wisely is the key for any enterprise to keep customers. It is important to establish ”the first time satisfaction”, ”the second time satisfaction” brought by recovery measures after service faults should also not be neglected. |
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| Service Failure, Service Recovery, Complaint Behavior, Cognitive Script, Second time Satisfaction |
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