A Different Approach to Service Recovery

It appears that service failures, like the poor, will always be with us. Almost all "moments of truth" service encounters are vulnerable to breakdowns. Handling complaints and resolving problems then become important activities to retain customers and to avoid undesirable outcomes such as negative word-of-mouth. Fortunately significant progress has been made in the field of service recovery in the last few years. However, to address service failures both effectively and efficiently, comprehensive service recovery programmes need to be formulated that take into account differences in complaints and in customers. Unfortunately, there is still a lack of understanding of the evaluation of different types of complaints by different types of consumers of service recovery efforts and their impact on outcomes such as customer satisfaction and loyalty. This exploratory study contributes to our understanding of service recovery. It attempts to assess, for different consumers and complaints, to what extent each of the underlying dimensions of service recovery influences satisfaction and repurchase intentions. Central in this study are customers of an airline company who handed in a written or oral complaint at the service desk after service failure