Investigating organisational strategies for service recovery in face-to-face and online transactions.

This research is relevant to customer relationship management and crisis management. It aims to investigate the strategies adopted by firms to effectively manage complaints in face-to-face and online transactions. Prior research has indicated that the service recovery literature can benefit from insights gleaned from the customer revenge, brand transgression and crisis management literatures. However, currently little has been done to integrate the contributions from these different fields in order to provide insight as to how to provide an effective organisational apology after a service failure. Moreover, service recovery researchers have called for further research into customer responses, which have received less attention in traditional service recovery research, such as revenge behaviours. My research proposes a quantitative approach to understanding the interaction between recovery agents and customers in the post-recovery phase. This will include the analysis of real customer revenge behaviour following an ostensibly real service failure in an online shopping experience. The research may also reveal the effects of apologies in the presence of utilitarian recovery. Empirical studies indicate that apologies may have little impact on customer responses when utilitarian needs are unfulfilled. However, research has not yet investigated whether highly empathetic apologies might substitute for monetary overcompensation. Moreover, scholars have highlighted the importance of developing recovery strategies that match the type of failure experienced by the customer. Recent research has even drawn attention to the possibility that providing an apology which is inappropriate to the failure context may damage stock prices. This emphasises the need to refine organisational recovery strategies and minimise the potential damage caused by service failures. Therefore, this research aims to pave the way towards the understanding of how to formulate more effective defensive marketing strategies.