Reliability‐based analysis of service recovery

To succeed, service businesses must offer their customers high‐quality, reliable service. However, many of the characteristics that make services unique also make it difficult to ensure consistently correct performance. To promptly identify and correct errors when they occur, service managers have been advised to include recovery steps in their service processes. However, while service recovery has anecdotal support, the literature has so far not offered management tools for analytically evaluating a system's needs for recovery measures or assessing their potential benefit. To provide such a tool, this paper transfers the logic of reliability theory, which is widely used in the design of electrical and mechanical systems. The application of this approach yields several useful insights for managers, to include the effects of various process structure characteristics.