Moderating role of <italic>a priori</italic> customer--firm relationship in service recovery situations

This study attempts to verify the moderating roles of the customer--firm relationship with regard to customers' responses to service failure and recovery. The hypotheses were tested based on the responses from 480 full-service restaurant customers, using <italic>t</italic>-tests and moderated regression analyzes. The findings indicate that in general, high relational customers tend to have high recovery expectations but, at the same time, respond more favorably to recovery efforts than do low relational customers in both low and high recovery situations. These results appear to stem from the wider zones of tolerance of high relational customers than those of low relational customers. This study demonstrates the importance of adopting the concept of zone of tolerance for accurate understandings of customers' responses to service failure and recovery.